


Tender

by peterplanet



Category: harry holland - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff, but mainly fluff, but then shit gets angsty :/
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-08 14:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 38,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18625156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterplanet/pseuds/peterplanet
Summary: her world begins with a burst of color. she just hopes that his did, too.





	1. prologue

Her world begins with a brush of fingertips. It is careless, easy as they pass by each other on the street. Her eyes, wide and nervous look back in hopes of finding him. She needs to see him, needs to understand who she has been destined to love. But they are gone, lost to the early London rush hour. Maybe their world did not begin with her on this foggy London morning. Maybe their story was not one that began with her.

She does not let herself think about the possibility that their color began with her. She would rather make believe that she was not their soulmate, that they were hers, but she was not theirs. It happens, she knows. There are stories all the time about one person being destined to another that did not see color when they first touched hands. Sometimes, the universe is cruel.

She just never wanted to believe that it would be cruel to her.


	2. Chapter 2

“You mean to tell me that no one turned around?” The voice is incredulous, eyes bugging out of a head that (Y/N) reasons is full of air.

Why she decided to tell Miranda, her boss at the local coffee shop, about her maybe soulmate is beyond her. Miranda is full of big ideas of what romance is but has no clue on how to go through with them. She wants good in the world and wants to promote it, wants it to flow through the blue veins that show behind her pale skin. She has delusions of grandeur and perhaps (Y/N) just wished to have those same ideas.

“That’s what I’m telling you, Miranda,” the younger girl murmurs. She wipes down the counter as she waits for a customer to come in, prays for someone to walk through the doors and save her from the hell she decided to put herself through. 

“That’s absurd!” And for a moment, (Y/N) can believe that it is just because of the passion in the brunette’s voice. “You deserve better than this. You deserve a real soulmate, someone that has you as their soulmate. You deserve returned love!”

“I just want to know who it was,” (Y/N) sighs. Her eyes are wistful as she studies the door to the café, watches people bustle around behind it. She shakes her head in a forlorn way and lets out a soft, gentle sigh that is hard to hear. Her words echo in her mind and she realizes that she spoke in the past tense about something that is still going on, something that is continuing to go on. “I want to know who it is.”

Her correction sails over Miranda’s head. For as kind as the woman is, she has never been the brightest. She owns a café in London that hardly gets any business and (Y/N) is one of three employees. London is tough for business, especially this side of it, but it has not stopped the woman yet. And maybe it’s delusional for her to continue running this business as if she can make ends meet with it.

Or maybe she’s just more of a dreamer than (Y/N) could ever be. 

* * *

On the other side of London, there is a thick unease forming in the Holland household. Silence sits over a family eating dinner, eyes locked on one another’s as they all swallow the elephant in the room. They take it piece by piece, digesting it with every bite and swallowing it thickly as the tension grows.

All of them know that Harry found his soulmate today. They let this knowledge hang thick between them and refuse to admit it, refuse to acknowledge it until he does himself. Mob bosses do not find soulmates. They do not let themselves fall in love and become wounded and weak that way. Dominic was the exception and he has made sure that his sons know what a weakness love is, how vulnerable it makes someone.

But that doesn’t mean that the universe stops assigning soulmates to the Holland boys. Tom has yet to find his, thankfully. It’s a blessing when one takes into account how many people he sleeps with and how many bars he frequents. It’s a wonder that he hasn’t, and it makes the family think that maybe he doesn’t have a soulmate. Maybe he’s one of the rare ones, the cases that scientists’ study. Not that Tom would ever let himself be studied like that.

“I don’t think it’s fair.” It’s Paddy who breaks the silence, the youngest who dares to defy the rules that each boy had acquainted himself with since he was young. “That we don’t get to fall in love or meet our soulmates. And if we do, we’re not allowed in the business. That’s not fair.”

“What have I told you?” Dominic asks as he sets down his fork and knife with a frightening carefulness that sets the family on edge. “What have I told each and every one of you boys since you were young? You especially, Paddy. What have I said?”

“That love makes us vulnerable,” the young boy grumbles. “But—”

“Exactly,” Dominic interrupts. His stony gaze focuses on every one of his four sons for moments at a time.

“But you fell in love, dad.” 

Harry wishes that Paddy would just shut up. He wishes that his younger brother would understand that there are just some facts, some rules in the Holland household that can’t be changed. And this is one of those rules, one of the unfightable fights that his father has brought up in their household. No one has been able to question it, to challenge it. Not even Nikki.

It’s an unspoken idea among the four boys that if Nikki couldn’t change her husband’s mind on something, no one in the Holland family can. It’s impossible to argue with them, impossible to beat these ideas or passions away from their father’s mind. If Nikki couldn’t have beat away an idea, no one can.

“And I don’t regret a second of that love,” their father replies calmly and evenly. He often treats discussions like these as business deals with rival mobs and it’s always been something that has plagued Harry, bothered him so deeply but left him unable to say anything in response. “But I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t come without risk.”

Harry hates how calculated his father is. He hates how his hands are folded so evenly, so delicately. He hates to see how even and cautious his father is in the face of a discussion about something that his younger brother is so passionate about. 

_Feel something!_  Harry wants to shout.  _Show us that you care, that there’s more to you than a man who gave up his life to raise a family and build a mob. Show us that there’s room in your heart for your sons, for us._

“Boys, I loved your mother. I cared for her so deeply, so truly, but every day came with another risk of death or hurt sent her way. Do you know how much I put into keeping her safe? How much time and energy I put into her safety and well-being? And not to mention money for security—I think that goes without saying.

“I would have done anything to keep your mother safe, but safety shouldn’t be a question when you’re in love. When you love someone, when you’re devoted to someone, you shouldn’t have to worry about their well-being. They certainly shouldn’t have to wonder if you’ll be coming home to them at the end of every day.

“And sometimes that isn’t enough. Sometimes, there’s not enough love in the world to keep them safe. That’s how it was with your mother and I don’t want any of you boys to experience the hurt of losing your soulmate. The colors aren’t worth it when there’s no one to see them with.”

Dominic laughs humorlessly and shakes his head. He picks up his fork and knife after he unfolds his hands and continues to eat. That means that the discussion is over and finally, finally Paddy is silenced. 

“Don’t make your soulmate worry about you. It’s better she thinks that you didn’t see any color when you brushed her hand. It’s easier this way.”

Harry knows that his father is talking to his brother. But he also knows that what was just said was directed at him.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s later that week when Harry sees her again. He knows who his soulmate is. He saw her face turn towards the crowd he slipped into that first time, noticed how surprised and hurt she had looked when he hadn’t turned towards her. He can’t imagine the hurt that he put her through, he doesn’t want to. So, he won’t.

He pushes the hurt down and swallows it whole as he approaches the counter that she stands behind. As the second in line to the throne of London’s most notorious mob, it goes without saying that he has his sources. But, certainly, she doesn’t know him. She has no reason to.

Harry knows her name before he reads her nametag. He knows that she’s (Y/N), that she has a tiny flat down the street from the café that she works at. He knows that she’s in university, that she’s working to earn her degree. He knows most everything about her before she even knows his name.

“Morning!” She breathes through a light, airy tone. She flutters from the back of the store where she’d been standing, getting some supplies to come to the front counter. She’s smiling at Harry and he entertains the thought that he does not deserve such gentleness, such kindness after all of the things that he’s done. He certainly doesn’t after all that he’s put her through.

“What can I get for you?”

It’s then and only then that Harry realizes he has no plan of attack. He has no idea what to say to her, no idea what to ask for as she stands before him. 

He’s seen pictures of her, but he’s never seen someone so beautiful before. He’s never seen someone so honest, so kind. It’s in her air, in her demeanor as she looks at him. The hesitation is written on his face, a sudden flash of insecurity that he can feel in the line of his mouth as it twitches.

“D’you like your drinks hot or cold?” She asks first. Her eyes are bright, steady as they focus on his.

“Hot,” comes his gruff reply. He’s glad that she’s giving him easy questions where there’s less opportunity for him to make a fool of himself.

“You add any cream or sugar when you make it for yourself?” She grabs what he assumes to be a medium cup and a marker that had been hiding in her apron.

“Usually just a few sugars.” He’s trying to keep his voice level as he answers her, trying to bite back the panic in his expression as he looks at her. He doesn’t know how to be normal, he doesn’t know what normal people talk about or how they communicate with one another. Even as a child, he was never able to have easy conversations with other kids. 

“And do you want to try any flavors? Sugar free ones are good in hot coffee, not as strong. They melt in really nicely and it’s good with a few sugars.” She’s writing on the side of his cup, her eyes studying him when she finishes writing.

He’s attractive. She’ll give him that. As awkward as he seems to be, he’s boyishly charming and easy on the eyes. He seems young, maybe about her age or a bit older. But he doesn’t seem to be much of a coffee drinker and part of her wonders what made him choose this run-down café in London over the nicer ones. 

“What…Whatever you think would be good, darling.” He can feel his cheeks turn crimson as the pet-name leaves his lips, cringing inwardly as the words leave his lips. 

How did you manage to make it even more awkward than before? He wonders briefly as his eyes slip closed and the humiliation that was sitting over him seeps through his skin and into his veins.

She doesn’t dwell on it though. Without another word, (Y/N) goes to making his coffee. A stupid song is playing on the radio and Harry hates himself for coming to her workplace. He doesn’t even drink coffee unless he’s pulling a late-night for his dad or Tom. He hates how bitter it tastes, how he can’t take it with extra milk without his family judging him or calling him crazy. 

When she comes back with his coffee, he takes a sip of it as he fishes his card out of his wallet and nearly gasps at the taste. Her eyes are bright as she pushes a few buttons on the register so that the card reader is ready for him as he slides it in.

“You seemed like a milk type of guy. Was I wrong?”

She’s laughing as his cheeks darken, grinning as he seems so nervous before her. He reasons that he’s never heard a sweeter sound than the laughter in her voice as she asks him if he wants his receipt.

* * *

It’s later that evening when Tom comes into Harry’s office. He can see the disapproval in his brown eyes, can read the anger in his face even though it seems emotionless. 

Tom grew up as the heir to the throne of the mob. He grew up as the next in line to get the crown that was the Holland legacy, the mob. And maybe it’s not something that Tom wants. It certainly isn’t something that Harry would have wanted. But that doesn’t mean that one of them, or Sam, wouldn’t have to take the lead when their father stepped down. Their days as regular citizens of London were numbered, and Harry was trying to hold onto them with everything in him.

Not that they’d ever really been regular citizens. That wasn’t a right that they’d ever been granted, just a delusion that they’d let themselves believe as children. It seemed that they still hadn’t been able to shake it as adults.

“You went to her café today.” It’s not a question when it leaves Tom’s lips, it’s not a question when he looks at his brother and knows the answer as he sees it written on his face. Harry’s never been very good at hiding his emotions, never been very good at hiding what he really feels.

“I thought as much,” Tom scoffs. He shakes his head and lets his shoulders fall as a sweep of compassion settles over him. He’s not mad and Harry knows that. It’s just dangerous for any of them to fall in love and Harry understands that Tom wants to protect him from their father’s wrath.

“You deserve to fall in love, Harry. We all do.” His smile is wry as he looks at the books behind Harry’s desk that sit on a high bookshelf. “I almost let myself and I regret myself for letting her go.”

Harry feels his blood run cold at the mention of his brother in love. His eyes widen, and he stands up to move back from his desk, his eyes studying his brother as he takes in his figure as if he’s an entirely new person. 

“You had a soulmate?” His voice is quiet as if their father can hear them when he’s not even home. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if he had every room bugged, though.

“I do,” Tom corrects his past-tense assumption purposefully. “She’s still out there. I let her go because of what dad told us, because of his idea that we all have to be tough and rugged and strong. I let her go so that I wouldn’t become as hard as dad, as rugged as he was after mum died. I made myself a promise, Harry, that I would never be like him. That I would never let myself become like him.

“But we only get one soulmate, Harry. She doesn’t get a new one when you let her go and if you let that leave you, if you let her leave you, then you’re not just hurting yourself. You’re hurting her, too, by letting her think that she was broken and that you were her soulmate, but she wasn’t yours.”

Harry freezes with this newfound understanding. It’s so simple, so easy to understand but it still has him surprised. It’s so easy it’s hard, so clear that it’s blurry. And it’s what makes him understand that (Y/N) deserves better than a life without her soulmate. She deserves better than him, but he’s what she’s stuck with.

* * *

“He was new.” Miranda’s peering over her shoulder as the milk-in-his-coffee man leaves. “Cute, too.”

(Y/N) hums in agreement as she tries to abate the heat in her cheeks. She watched him leave without anything more than the money he’d given her, and a smile sent her way. He’d tipped her over thirty dollars and, though she’d tried to give it back to him, he’d forced her to take it. 

“Consider it my treat,” he’d said with a soft smile and a wave. “Just for you, though, (Y/N).”

She’d felt bad pocketing it and had offered to share it with Miranda, offered to split it evenly between the two of them. But Miranda had been just as adamant about (Y/N) keeping it as the milk-in-his-coffee guy had been.

“Did you get his name?” Miranda asks as the other girl works to busy herself, trying to keep herself occupied so that she won’t think of him. “When you made his coffee? You could have pretended that you needed his name for his drink order.”

She doesn’t want to think about the rich man that had taken milk in his coffee. She doesn’t want to think about how pretty he was, how soft his eyes were when he looked at her. She doesn’t want to think about how nervous he was, and she doesn’t want to think about him. But Miranda has other plans, apparently, and won’t let the idea go.

“He was the only person in the store, Miranda,” (Y/N)’s words are accusing, and her tone is heavier than she initially wanted them to be. She wants to take them back, swallow them whole as soon as she recognizes the hurt in Miranda’s eyes. 

“Why would I ask for him for a name, anyways? We usually don’t, y’know. Or, I guess that I don’t, at least.” Her tone is softer this time and she watches Miranda’s shoulders relax at the change. 

“I don’t know!” Miranda’s tone is harsh, a bit critical as she looks at (Y/N) through her brown eyes. There’s only a bit of warmth to them, only a bit of kindness in them where there’s usually a bounty to be found. Miranda might not be the brightest woman, but she is one of the kindest that (Y/N) has ever met. But sometimes, kindness isn’t enough. Sometimes, kindness doesn’t keep you warm and safe at night. It doesn’t allow Miranda to see the hurt inside of people, it just allows her to make them feel better. 

“Maybe you wanted to know his name, so you pretended like you needed it for his drink. Your soulmate didn’t stop to see you yesterday, (Y/N), the least you could do is pretend like you’re trying to find someone to be with.” 

(Y/N) nearly chokes at the condescending nature to Miranda’s voice. She doesn’t want to find a new soulmate when she lost the one, she’d been promised. She doesn’t want to look for someone new when she’s still trying to come to terms with the fact that her soulmate doesn’t want her. She needs to process this first heartbreak before she lets herself process a new one.

“It’s been a day, Miranda.” She tries to keep her tone level and steady, tries to keep her voice from shaking as she fights back the tears that threaten to spill.

Miranda, always oblivious to the needs and feelings of others, doesn’t notice how the air around (Y/N) shifts. She doesn’t notice how her eyes have filled with tears, she doesn’t notice how the other girl is trying to fight them. For all the world, Miranda would never notice or care about the feelings of others unless they presented to her as fact and not something that she needs to infer.

“And you need to get out there! You need to show the world who you are instead of hiding so much. You’re beautiful, you’re funny, you’re smart, you’re hard-working…(Y/N), the list goes on and on about you, but you’d rather hide yourself to people that could be interested in you.” Miranda scoffs and lets the silence hang between the two of them. Her eyes don’t meet (Y/N)’s still as she focuses on cars passing them by on the street outside of the café. 

If she had looked at (Y/N)’s (e/c) eyes, she would have seen that they had filled with tears that were threatening to spill. She would have noticed that a few had, that a few were spilling down her cheeks as she tried to fight them back. But Miranda doesn’t look, and she doesn’t know what’s going on inside of the girl’s head.

Sometimes, (Y/N) reasons, it’s as if no one cares enough to know.


	4. Chapter 4

(Y/N) goes into work the next day heavy-hearted. She’s nervous to confront Miranda after yesterday’s ending, nervous to see her. She doesn’t want Miranda to be her bubbly self but (Y/N) doesn’t necessarily want an apology. She wants yesterday back.

She wants to go back and ask the man for his name. All night, she’s been hung up on him. She finds her thoughts circling back to him and entertaining the idea that she might be on his mind, too.

(Y/N) wants to know that she’s driving someone insane. She wants that freedom, that liberty of knowing that someone is thinking about her. She’s never had that before, though. And that’s what makes Miranda’s words an even harder pill to swallow. 

She spent the better part of last night thinking about what Miranda had said. It had been true, obviously, or it wouldn’t hurt this badly. Only the truth could sting, (Y/N) reasoned. Only the truth could resonate within her chest like this.

_“…you’d rather hide yourself to people that could be interested in you.”_

 

She had replayed it over and over in her mind until she became numb with the context of it. She was desperate to understand just what Miranda had meant, spent hours drafting and revising the tone of it until she was torn by what it could have meant. What people would be interested in her? If her own soulmate didn’t want her, what was the point in trying anymore? 

If she wasn’t destined to spend her life with her soulmate, (Y/N) didn’t want much of a life at all. It wasn’t that she’d put all of her happiness, all of her self-worth into what her soulmate thought of her. It was simply that she hadn’t imagined she’d be one of the unlucky few that never really got a soulmate.

And, sure, now there were dating sites and apps for people to use. There were some specifically designed for people without soulmates or who found themselves in situations like (Y/N) had found herself in. But that felt like giving up. It felt like admitting that she was broken, that her soulmate wasn’t who she was going to be with for the rest of her life.

Soulmates were something so special, so sacred that they’d studied them in school. They’d studied the scientific properties, what went on chemically in one’s brain that led them to seeing colors after brushing hands with someone. They’d studied the first soulmates, the first people to fall in love, and every child had grown up knowing that someone, somewhere in the world was destined for them.

But reality is never as kind as childhood makes it out to be. And as (Y/N) walks into work the day after Miranda’s cutting remark was given, she reasons that the universe has never really been on her side. Not completely, at least. Not wholly like she wanted it to be, like she needs it to be. Reality will never be kind to her, so she needs to figure out a coping mechanism.

And the pretty boy, milk-in-his-coffee boy standing in the café as she walks in might just be the answer to all of her prayers.

* * *

“He refuses to let me make his coffee.” Harry can hear (Y/N)’s boss, Miranda, grumbling behind the counter. 

She doesn’t sound happy. She doesn’t sound pleased by the fact that Harry won’t let her make his coffee. And he knows it’s because he tipped (Y/N) the day before. He knows that Miranda wants that same treatment.

That says that (Y/N) tried to share. That she tried to split it with Miranda even though he’d told her that it was all for her. She’s a good person with a good heart and he has no idea why the universe put them together.

“It’s no big deal,” he hears (Y/N) say as she clocks in. Her voice is soft, level as she tries to calm Miranda down. “I don’t mind, Miranda.”

“But he’s a big tipper.” And that’s what solidifies it for Harry, especially as he watches (Y/N)’s face fall. 

“And I offered to share.” And with the finality, the ending tone in her voice, (Y/N) walks to the counter with a soft smile. 

Her eyes are so soft that Harry fears he’s going to melt into them, that they’ll swallow him whole and he’ll fall into her gentleness. It’s a fate that he doesn’t fear, one that he would welcome easily. He wishes now more than ever that he could go back in time and turn around when their hands brushed. He wishes that he could take back the time that they’d lost, make up for it somehow. But he knows that he can’t, so he lets out a soft breath as he looks at her.

“Same thing as yesterday?” She asks through a soft tone, her smile gentle as she grabs a medium cup to write on it. “Little bit of milk, four sugars?” 

“And, uhm…” Harry’s nervous suddenly. His eyes are stuck to the counter beneath his hands as he tries to find the words to get her to talk to him, to bridge this gap between them that he’s created. He wants her so badly to know that he cares, wants her to understand that he wants her as his soulmate, that he’s flattered to be hers.

“Add your number, if you don’t mind?” It’s the closest that he’s come to flirting in years, the closest that he reasons he’ll ever get to it. 

By the way her eyes light up and her smile turns shy, Harry knows that he’s made the right choice by asking her for her number. He knows he did the right thing by attempting to bridge this gap and make a beginning to their story that isn’t in the walls of this run-down café. He can’t make up for lost time, but Harry can try to make things better for their future.

When she comes back with his coffee, Harry reaches for his wallet. He watches her shake her head and realizes how sweet she is, how soft she is by the handwriting on the side of his cup. She’s written her number and her name with a small heart on the side of it and it makes his heart flutter.

“Don’t worry about it,” she assures him. “As long as I get your name and number in return, that’s all that I want from you today.” 

It’s with that statement that Harry knows he’s truly done the right thing by attempting to bridge the gap between them.

* * *

Harry returns to his family home in London later that night. He enters it quietly as if the world could tell that he’d been out visiting his soulmate, as if anyone could know that just by looking at him. He’s not ashamed of going to see (Y/N) despite what his father has tried to implant in his brain all those years. He’s not ashamed of seeing her, of being in front of her and bridging the gap between them. He’s ashamed that he feels as though he should be.

For years, he’s been told that to be in love is to be vulnerable and weak. He doesn’t want his father to see him that way, but he also doesn’t want to be subjected to a life without his soulmate. He wants love to strengthen him, to make him better as it must have done for his father. He knows that the man who was strengthened and fortified by love is not the man who raised him these past few years. That man was different. It was a different Dominic that Harry doesn’t ever reason he’ll get to know.

That man could have been his dad. Instead, Dominic has become his father. There’s a heavy difference between those words that Harry had never believed in until recently. He hadn’t wanted to believe in it.

But secrets are not an option in the Holland household. Harry does not get the luxury of having a secret soulmate because his father is the king of the mob. Secret is not in his vocabulary.

“So,” comes his father’s cold tone. He’s sitting at the dining room table with the paper spread out before him, a cup of coffee sitting adjacent to it. His eyes never leave the paper as he begins to speak to Harry. “You’re meeting your soulmate behind my back, then?”

“She doesn’t know that she’s my soulmate, dad,” Harry grumbles. It won’t appease the situation, the way that Harry’s mumbling his replies. If anything, it will only make Dom more upset. 

“Speak up when you talk to me, boy.” His father’s gaze is steel, made of cold metal that almost frightens Harry to look at for too long. His tone is colder than his gaze and it has Harry wondering, briefly, if that’s even possible. Anger seems to be something that his father is well-versed in. But he supposes that he has to be in order to be as successful as he has been.

“She doesn’t know that she’s my soulmate.” Harry’s tone is clear, echoing throughout the dining room for a moment as his words hang between them. 

He watches as his father puts the paper down so that it’s lying flat on the dining room table. He pushes it away from himself as he stands and moves over to Harry, his brown eyes studying him for a cold and calculated moment. 

Do you even see me as your son? Harry wonders. Or am I just another business deal to you?

The truth would likely break him. It would destroy him to know that his father doesn’t love him, that he never loved him. It would tear him into pieces and leave him as heartless, as ruthless as his father is right now. 

“But she knows your name. I assume she has your number, or you have hers, right?” His father scoffs and shakes his head in disbelief. It’s a rhetorical question, obviously, and Harry knows that Dominic already knows the answer. There’s no point in replying.

“What does love make you, son?” Dominic’s voice is cold and calm as his icy stare rakes over the boy in front of him. 

Harry can’t tell if this is another rhetorical question or not. His mouth opens and closes as he flounders before his father, unsure of how to reply to such a normal question. And it hurts that this answer is normal, that the Holland men have rehearsed and repeated it every day until they know it’s implications by heart. It hurts that they can’t just be a normal family—or relatively normal, considering all of the loss that they’ve experienced. 

“I asked you a question,” Dominic repeats in the same cold tone. “Are you going to answer?”

“Love makes me weak,” Harry grumbles. He shouldn’t have grumbled, shouldn’t have tried to test his father like that.

There’s a resounding smack that echoes through the room as Dominic’s hand makes contact with Harry’s cheek. Harry feels as if his heart has stopped even though the only sound, he can hear is the blood pumping through his ears. He feels numb despite the stinging in his cheek. He looks to his father in utter disbelief; as ruthless as Dom has always been, he’s never laid a hand on any of his children before.

“I told you to speak up when you talk to me, boy.” His father speaks so close to his son, his face so close that Harry can feel the rush of air against his lips as he speaks. “And when I say something, I expect my children to listen.”

Children. Boy. These are words that isolate Dominic. They make him a monster instead of a man, an authoritative dictator instead of a father. Harry is not his son in this moment. He is his child, a boy. Just as Dominic is his father, Harry has learned that he is not Dominic’s son. They are strangers living in the same house, blood relatives estranged from one another. 

Love has always been Dominic’s greatest weakness. Harry just never wanted to believe that it meant he would not love his own children.


	5. Chapter 5

(Y/N) wakes up the next morning to a day off. These are a rarity in her life as one of three employees at the café, so she’s willing to take what she can get. As she rolls over in bed, her back screaming from the abuse it’s taken by the worn-out mattress she uses, she sees a text on her phone.

_Hoping I could take you out tonight, if you’re free?_

It’s from Harry, evidently, and the fact that he messaged her means a lot. She didn’t expect him to be so direct, but she can’t say that she’s complaining. He’s cute, she’ll admit, and he seems so boyishly sweet that she can’t imagine saying no.

She texts back an affirmative and her address for him to pick her up at. They settle on a time for dinner and for once, (Y/N) feels truly happy.

It’s been a while since she’s had something or someone new in her life. She spends so much of her time at the café or at university that she often forgets that there’s a world outside of her small, run-down apartment. She spends so much time studying and working that she doesn’t have very many personal connections, so for Harry to be in her life is for a new world to begin altogether.

She doesn’t know if she’ll tell him that her soulmate bailed on her. She doesn’t know if that’s first-date material or not, if that’s something that you bring up casually over dinner or that you work up to. Is that something you ever admit? Or, do you let your partner believe that they’re the one, that they’re your soulmate?

That thought nearly knocks (Y/N) backwards. She’s embarrassed that she’d even think such a thing, that she’d even want to lie to Harry about who her soulmate was or could have been. It wasn’t him, she knows. He doesn’t seem like the type of person to lie to her like that or make her hurt that way.

Harry seems good. He seems kind and sweet, gentle and loving. He was nervous to ask for milk in his coffee, how could he break her heart like that? But there’s something familiar about him, something that (Y/N) can’t shake from her mind. Maybe he came into the café before, or maybe he’s in one of her classes at university. He seems young enough that he could be attending university like her, but she’s not sure. Maybe it’s just his air that’s familiar to her, his kindness. 

But a part of her knows that none of it is true. The other pieces of her just wish that it could be so, that he’s just a casual familiar to her. But (Y/N) will learn that wishing isn’t enough, sometimes. Hope doesn’t keep love alive and it doesn’t give birth to tomorrow. It’s just what gets her out of bed.

She remembers her days in primary school when children would lie about finding their soulmates. She remembers learning about colors and how beautiful they were, how indescribable they are. Every child wanted that type of beauty, that type of beautiful romance. They wanted to feel that rush of euphoria as their hand would brush their soulmate’s for the first time, wanted to feel alive because of it.

Love, (Y/N) remembers thinking, would not be her ultimate goal. Some people romanticized the idea of being in love so much that they put all of their weight into it and seemed to only live to find their soulmate. What would happen if they didn’t have a soulmate? Or they didn’t meet them in this lifetime? What then?   
Would they die from the heartbreak of it all? Or would they find a new purpose?

(Y/N) never wanted to be the type of person that relied on love to keep her happy. She didn’t want to be the type of person to put all of her energy into finding her soulmate and leave little room for finding that type of love in herself and in her work.

She never wanted to be that person, but she feared that it was who she was becoming. Ever since her soulmate brushed her hand, she wanted to find them. She wanted to thank them and to curse them for giving her all of these colors without their love. She wanted to thank them for how beautiful everything had become since she’d touched them, but she wanted to curse them for not staying with her long enough to figure out if they were even compatible.

And it wasn’t her soulmate’s fault. (Y/N) wasn’t naïve enough to truly believe that her soulmate had conspired against her by refusing to turn around. Sometimes, the universe was cruel and (Y/N) was going to have to learn to accept that notion. It was okay, but it would take time for her to heal. She just didn’t want it to.

Love was supposed to be easy. This had been her lament for the past three days, ever since she’d found her colors. It was supposed to be natural and good and easy to fall in love since they had soulmates. In primary school, they’d learned about a time before soulmates. A time when people had been free to date and choose their own love, never knowing if who they were with was really their true match. But, now that science had progressed enough to allow researchers to develop specific reactions in patients that could be transferred to their children through genetics, they didn’t have to worry. Everyone had a true love, a scientific match.

But, still, there were cases where people didn’t find their soulmate. There were cases like (Y/N) where her perfect match wasn’t truly compatible with her. There was room for error in this new science, but it was a risk that society had taken. It was a risk that only certain people had to live with, a side-effect that only affected the few. What was the harm in a select number of people having a defective gene when the many got to flourish because of it? 

(Y/N) had thought, as a child, that those people were just stories. Those who never found their soulmates weren’t real because they had to have found their soulmate eventually. Someone had to be out there for them, right?

But now that (Y/N) was one of those few, she was facing a new predicament: was the sacrifice of a few worth the benefit of the many? 

She doesn’t remember a time where she’s been so nervous. She’s been on one date before and this is something new altogether. This isn’t high school, this isn’t a dare gone wrong. This is real as far as she knows, though those dates all those years ago were just as real.

The previous date had been a joke. The boy hadn’t really wanted her, he hadn’t really wanted to get to know her. And maybe it was a while ago that it happened, maybe it was years ago, but it still haunts (Y/N). Cruelty like that is never really shaken from your spirit. It resides and haunts you until you’re living with it every day, until it has begun to eat away at your self-esteem and demolish your self-worth. Hatred like that doesn’t resonate within the attacker; (Y/N) knows that those boys have already forgotten about that day.

It was just another Friday in their academic careers. Why should they remember it? She can’t blame them, not really. They were just boys, stupid boys that she hopes have grown into smarter men. Maybe one day they’ll have a daughter and she’ll be made a fool of in the same way that (Y/N) was and maybe that Friday night, just a normal Friday night in their academic careers, will come rushing back like a bad dream. Maybe (Y/N) will haunt them in that moment, that brief second where she crosses their mind. They might wonder if she took it as a joke, if she ever learned to live with it. All (Y/N) wants is for those boys, those stupid boys that she hopes have grown into smarter men, is to see her in their daughters on day. She wants her hurt to transcend time in a selfish way that she would never admit out loud because all of that hurt has led her to this moment and, despite the initial surprise of her soulmate not turning around, all of that hurt prepared her for the initial let-down that it created. 

She doesn’t want other girls to hurt the same way that she did, that she still does. She wants the people who break them to hurt. But she’ll never admit that, not even in her darkest moments because it’s so harrowing, so cruel of her that she doesn’t know if she could bear to hear those words roll off of her lips.   
Really, all that she wants is to be loved. And she hopes that with Harry, that might be a possibility that they might one day entertain. Or, it’s a night with free food on her behalf. And at this point, she’s willing to take that and call it even with the universe. 

* * *

Harry approaches her door nervously, shyly. He’s never felt this scared to talk to a girl before, but (Y/N) is different. She’s his soulmate, the one person that he’s supposed to spend the rest of his life with. He doesn’t know how to talk to her, how to approach her. Especially since she has no idea who he is outside of the coffee shop.

He doesn’t exist to her as anything more than a coffee person. He’s just the boy she met at work, just someone she knows inside the four walls of her café. It feels safer that way to Harry. It feels safer for her to know him as nothing more than a stranger, for their beginning to be even that way. Except it isn’t.

Harry’s done research on (Y/N). He’s discovered her history, found out everything that there was to know about her. It’s unfair that she doesn’t have that same ability, that she has to find everything out from his mouth. And that’s an unreliable source.

If he were to have asked her all of this information, he reasons that she wouldn’t have told him the truth immediately. He wouldn’t have known that she left home at fifteen to escape an abusive situation. He wouldn’t have known that she was paying her own way through university by working long, strenuous shifts at the café. He never would have known any of that because it’s not information that someone willingly gives out.

And does he blame her? No. He wouldn’t be able to blame her if she didn’t tell him any of that even if they were married. It’s sensitive information, the type that a person isn’t proud of. She probably isn’t proud to have left home, she probably isn’t excited by the fact that she’s been on her own since fifteen. She hasn’t seen her family in four years, he assumes. That isn’t something that someone would just disclose. And he can’t blame her.

Harry doesn’t know how the topic of the mob will come about. It has to, he knows, but he doesn’t know how. That type of thing isn’t any more suitable for first-date material than her running away from home. How would it even come up?

_“So, my dad runs one of London’s largest mobs. My mom died a few years ago at the hands of a rival mob and my dad doesn’t want us to fall in love. I haven’t called him dad in years; I either call him by his name or refer to him as ‘father’. My brother was guilted into leaving his soulmate and even though you’re mine, my initial reaction was to leave you instead of telling you that I saw colors, too.”_

For some reason, Harry doesn’t imagine that any of that would go over well. He imagines (Y/N) leaving in a storm of fire and anger and he wouldn’t blame her. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of what he’s done. On top of that, he’s researched her history without her consent and found out more information than she’d ever be willing to divulge. He doesn’t want her to know any of this.

He wants these skeletons to stay in his closet. He wants to be a normal boy who fell in love with a normal girl, a normal boy with a normal soulmate. He wants their story to be easy and good and gentle, something that would put their future children to bed. Harry wants their story to be one of love and growth, but he knows that his wish isn’t reasonable.

Their story is already one of heartbreak. Harry didn’t turn around and with that he wrote the first chapter of their love story. The one where he didn’t turn around, where he didn’t try to show her that he wanted to fall in love with her, that it would be a privilege to do so. Already, he’s made her feel unwanted and unloved. He’s made her feel isolated, small. Or, that’s what he imagines, anyway.

He knows that this is something that would be hard to forgive. He doesn’t blame her for that, he couldn’t blame her for that. It’d be impossible to. Harry is not the one who has to deal with this heartbreak, at least not first-hand. He’s not the one who feels broken.

But all of this is speculation. It’s dangerous, something so easy and tempting to fall into that he worries that it’s right. Sometimes, the easiest things are the most correct and Harry doesn’t want to be that way. He doesn’t want to believe that (Y/N) will hate him when she finds all of this out (which she has to at some point, he reasons, because she deserves the truth). He doesn’t want to believe that it would end their soft beginning and cancel out the happiness that he brought her at work. He doesn’t want to believe it, he can’t let himself believe it. He reasons that believing it would break him. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t entertain the thoughts and anxieties running through his head. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to give into them when they feel so right, so real.

His anxieties have always been his downfall. He doesn’t suppose that it’ll stop anytime soon, but he hopes that one day his brain might calm down enough to allow him room to breathe. For now, he’ll suffer in silence and try to work up the courage to knock on the door to (Y/N)’s flat.


	6. Chapter 6

(Y/N) hears the knock at her door and has to force her legs to move towards it. She’s nervous, suddenly, as everything feels real and right in front of her. She never expected that she’d be going on a date. She never expected that she would be the type of girl that someone would want to take out.

“I’m coming!” She calls out, if only to buy herself more time to panic.

She’s suddenly struck with the urge to change. Her dress feels too short and too long all at once, the color that she once thought matched her skin-tone now feels ugly and heavy against her skin. Her makeup looks wrong when she sees her reflection, her eyebrows are sisters and not twins. She feels so self-conscious that she almost wants to call out that she’s feeling ill; and it wouldn’t be a lie.

Her stomach is churning with the worst set of butterflies that it’s ever had. Her eyes are welling with tears that she’s trying her best to fight back. She doesn’t want him to see her this way, this weak and small, so she’s fighting it down the best that she can. She abates it enough to open the door to her flat with the meekest smile that she thinks she’s ever worn.

“You can come in for a minute, if you want?” She offers. “That way you’re not waiting for me to get my life together for another five minutes and thinking I’m standing you up. I just need to…I just need to grab my purse, and then we’re good to go!” 

(Y/N) has to clear her throat to fight back a lot of the nerves that have risen in her. Harry looks impeccable in his black custom-fitted suit that appears to be worth more than her entire flat when it’s furnished. She feels awkward in her rip-off dress that she bought on clearance, she suddenly feels stupid and small for even trying to wear it to the restaurant that he was treating her to. 

When she’d done her initial research on the place that he suggested taking her to over text, she’d told him that she could never afford it. It was way out of her price range, too much for her even if she saved up for months. It was so fancy that she’d never heard of it, so fancy that she’d had to google it. 

It was a four-course type of restaurant that seemed as if its waiting list was longer than life. For one person, it was £125. (Y/N) had no idea how Harry was going to pay for both of them and she had no idea how he’d managed to get them a reservation on such short notice. She was starting to believe that she knew little to nothing about him, that everything that she’d ever thought to have known about him was a lie.

“You look really good, by the way,” she says in a soft tone after taking in his appearance. His suit seems to be a custom fit from the way that it clings to him but doesn’t hug him awkwardly. 

Harry’s cheeks flush at the praise and he clears his throat. He passes her a timid smile and it eases (Y/N)’s mind to know that he seems to be just as nervous as her about this date. It’s nice to know that she’s not the only one feeling lost and awkward about this whole situation.

“Thank…Thank you, (Y/N).” She can see the inward cringe written across his face at the way that he stuttered. She can see the anger and she laughs softly in hopes of getting it to go away because she doesn’t want their first date to start like that. She wants it to begin with sweet words of praise and tender awkwardness as she rushes around her home to find everything that she needs before they can go.

“You look really good, too,” he affirms. His voice is smoother this time and she hopes it’s because she’s putting him at ease; that’s all she really wants, if she’s being honest. “Really, (Y/N), I feel really lucky to be taking you out tonight.”

“Speaking of,” she adds timidly as she goes to find her purse. She battled with her heels to strap them on for an awkward amount of time and she’s just now realizing that she really could have worn flats. No one would have cared. “We don’t have to go to such a fancy place, Harry. I’d be good with a shitty diner or some run-down old restaurant. You don’t need to try and impress me or anything by taking me somewhere fancy, okay?”

She watches Harry’s features soften and a shy, boyish smile take over. She watches him shake his head and feels her heart flutter as his curls move around his head, a soft laugh echoing through the room as he does. She notices how he’s playing with his hands, wringing them nervously and running them along his arms as a tick of sorts.

“I want to,” he assures her. “If it makes you feel better, though, next time we can go somewhere more low-key.”

“So, there’s going to be a next time?” (Y/N) knows that her smile is taking up most of her face as she finally comes back to the front door, purse in hand as she finally finds herself ready to leave. 

“I mean…I really, you know…I hope so, I’d like for there to be. I don’t mean…I’m not trying to be cocky, I just—”

(Y/N)’s laughter cuts Harry off. She’s smiling and giggling as they make their way out of her flat and she locks it behind them. “Harry, I’m just teasing,” she assures him. “I’d like for there to be a second date, too. Maybe a third if you play your cards right.” 

He seems relaxed under that idea and she sees his smile, catches it as he ducks his head to try and hide it. It’s a cute tick that she notices because it hides his face behind his hair, makes him look small and young even though he’s in a custom-made suit.

“I’d like that, too.” He breathes his response so softly that it’s almost as if he didn’t say anything. (Y/N) has to strain to hear him but her smile never falters, never leaves her as she looks at the man before her.

She doesn’t think that she’ll ever get over how youthful he is, how gentle. He’s so soft and kind that it makes her nervous, so meek that it makes her heart warm to think about. (Y/N) doesn’t know how she got so lucky as to catch his attention, but she’s glad that she did. She’s flattered that she did.

* * *

They pull up to the restaurant in a car that (Y/N) had reasoned was worth more than she was. She felt as if she was decreasing its value just by sitting inside of it and had been grateful that Harry had opened the door for her. Otherwise, she might have never gotten in and the reservations would have sat unused. 

There’s valet parking and (Y/N) almost offers to pay for it before she sees the prices listed. All of this is out of her element; it’s so fancy that she doesn’t really know what to do. Everything is so expensive that it makes her nervous to think about. Touching the door to the restaurant could decrease its property value, her shoes could scuff the floor and she’d have to pay to have it cleaned.

None of this is anything that she knows. She feels out of her comfort zone, pushed out of it instead of stepping into it. A part of her wonders if the food will even be worth it or if it will be small portions. The rich like to put on extravagant shows of their wealth and (Y/N) knows that sometimes it isn’t all that they make it out to be. It might be worth it and even if it isn’t, she’d never express that to Harry.

He pulls out her chair for her and pushes it in gently. He’s been nothing but chivalrous ever since their night together began and (Y/N) appreciates it. She needs this type of kindness to feel welcomed in this world that isn’t her own. With a silent laugh, she realizes that colors were never her biggest obstacle. The wealthy were.

They look at their menus that aren’t really menus. They list what they’ll be served that night and most everything appears to be too fancy for (Y/N) to even understand. A part of her is glad that she doesn’t have the choice of what to get because, if she did, she would have been lost and would have made a fool of herself in front of Harry.

He seems enthusiastic about their meal. He seems to know what everything is, seems to understand it all pretty well. This solidifies the fact that they are from two different worlds in (Y/N)’s mind. She now understands that they are two different people brought together by something that she doesn’t quite understand. Why did he take an interest in her? Why did he want to bring her to this fancy restaurant and use his wealth for this night? Did he feel as though he had to impress her? 

Now that he’s seen her messy flat, she knows that he won’t want to impress her again. And that’s okay, honestly. Her heart probably can’t take any more good impressions; it’ll give out because of the adrenaline that her anxiety is pumping through it.

“Tell me about yourself,” (Y/N) says as she sets the menu-that-isn’t-a-menu down in front of her. They’ve been sitting in amiable silence for the past while and, while it’s been comfortable, she’s desperate to break it. “Do you have any siblings?”

“I do, yeah,” Harry says. He seems relieved by the fact that she’s initiated a conversation, as if he didn’t really know how. 

It’s cute how nervous he appears to be. It makes her feel less nervous, more at ease with the fact that they’re going to be together that night. He’s just as nervous as she is, and it puts her mind at ease to know that he’s just as out of his element as she is. 

“I have an older brother, Tom. Paddy’s younger than my and Sam is my twin.”

His smile is bashful as he finishes speaking, his eyes dropping down to the floor beneath them as he does. It’s as though the topic of his brothers, his family, embarrasses him. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to talk about them, to admit that he has them.

She doesn’t comment on that. She just nods her understanding and smiles as the waiter comes back to pour their champagne. 

He’s talking about the brand and how old it is, and Harry seems to understand what’s going on. (Y/N) has no idea what any of it means. Why does it matter how old it is? Why should the brand or maker mean anything to her?

Admittedly, she’s never cared much about the politics of alcohol. Any bottle of wine is a good Saturday night for her and that’s what matters. That’s what matters to her, anyway.

When the waiter leaves, she lets out a nervous laugh and shakes her head. “Did any of that actually mean anything to you?” She asks. She’s not trying to be mean and her tone isn’t degrading; she’s simply curious.

“My father loves his alcohol,” Harry admits through a dry chuckle. “I suppose that’s something that was passed onto me.”

She nods her understanding as she takes a sip of the supposedly Christ-like champagne. She’ll admit that it’s good, she won’t deny the fact that she enjoys it. It’s a bit drier than she would have expected, but maybe those years in solitude didn’t do much good for it. They certainly wouldn’t for her.

“So, what do you do, then?” She asks as a moment’s silence settles over them. Her eyes are looking up to his and her smile is shy, sweet as she looks at him over their glasses of champagne. 

Harry seems to flounder at that question. He seems suddenly unsure of what he does, suddenly nervous about answering such a simple question. She won’t press as to why quite yet, she doesn’t think that she could. But she does wonder, and she certainly notices.

“I work in the family business.” The hesitation that was present was minute, minuscule and almost unobservable. But (Y/N) has spent her entire life noticing the small things about people in order to protect herself and this will be no different. Harry will be no different, she reasons. 

And she doesn’t want him to be just another observation. She wants so badly for him to be more than that to her, but she knows that it’s nearly impossible. When you spend your whole life acting a certain way, it’s nearly impossible to change. She won’t stop being on the lookout for the little hesitations in people, she won’t stop looking for reasons not to trust people. It’s not in her nature and she doesn’t truly believe that it ever really will be. 

“And what’s that business?” She’s asking just to push him now. And while a part of her knows that it isn’t fair, that he’s obviously uncomfortable by just the mention of his brothers, she wants to see what he says. She wants to be able to hold him to it later, as unfair as that is.

She’s taking a calculated sip of champagne when he replies. “A law firm. I’m just a secretary, essentially, but it’s…it’s good work.”

 _Good enough to get you a reservation here._  She thinks through an internalized scoff.

She doesn’t know that there’s truth in his lie. He does work in the legal world, just not on the side of it that she wants to believe. There are facts that (Y/N) doesn’t know, so many things that she will never know about him.

She doesn’t know that there’s a gun tucked into his pants. She doesn’t know that the owner of this restaurant owed Harry a favor and that’s how they got these reservations on such short notice. She doesn’t know that it was either giving him these reservations or facing a bullet in the head. There are facts that (Y/N) will never know, not yet. 

She will soon, though. Sooner than anyone would have liked.

* * *

The rest of the evening passes in sweet gentleness. The conversation becomes less awkward, less heavy than it was over champagne. Harry seems to have genuinely taken an interest in her for a reason that she doesn’t know or fully understand. She doesn’t think that she could ever truly understand what compelled him to ask her out; she’s just a barista and he (allegedly) works at his family’s law firm. He’s well-off financially and it seems as if they’ve come from two separate worlds that were never meant to collide. She doesn’t know how she feels now that they have collided. 

Harry takes her back to her apartment and she doesn’t want the night to end. She doesn’t want this easiness to go away, she doesn’t want to put it to bed when they’re both living it so flawlessly. She wants to nurse it and raise it with him without losing their initial clumsiness.

The night hasn’t passed without a hitch, though. There were too many glasses of champagne on (Y/N)’s part and words withheld by Harry. He seemed to become antsy at the mention of his family, seemed to be too scared to really talk about them. She’d shared a lot once the champagne had begun to hit her and she really wishes that she hadn’t drank so much.

She feels foolish as he helps her up the stairs to her flat. She feels as if she’s made the worst impression possible on him, as though she ruined what they had together with the fourth glass of champagne. It’s never taken much to get her to this point, but she’s mortified that Harry had to see her like this on their first date. 

Maybe it’s the four glasses of champagne running through her, or maybe it’s the late hour. Whatever it might be, she feels as if she’s going to cry. There are embarrassed tears sitting behind her eyes and she’s trying desperately to blink them back. Her mascara is too expensive to ruin in this way and she doesn’t want to become a drunken fool in his memory. 

What (Y/N) doesn’t know is that Harry could never see her like that. Not even if he tried. He thinks that she looks adorable like this, flushed from the alcohol and her hair slightly messy from how she’s been trying to fix it all night. She’s whimpering under her breath, soft curses as she tries to get up the stairs and to her flat. 

He can tell that she’s embarrassed from the flush of her cheeks and the way that she’s fumbling with her keys. While tipsy, she certainly didn’t have that much to the point that she’d be a bumbling fool. (Y/N) might pride herself on being observant, but Harry has to be in order to survive. Noticing a slight movement can be the difference between life and death, a moment’s hesitation can define his lifespan. He notices all of these things about her and holds them close, keeps them tucked away in his memory so that he might use them later.

“I didn’t mean to get like this,” she murmurs bashfully as she finally gets the key in the lock. They’ve made it up the flights of stairs and she knows that this is where the night is supposed to end, maybe with a kiss. This is the part where he leaves, but she doesn’t want him to.

She wants him to stay. She wants him to be with her all night, to enjoy his close intimacy. She feels so drawn to him, so connected that she wonders if he might be her real soulmate. Maybe he’s not the one that left her on the street (she reasons that Harry isn’t that type of guy without knowing how wrong she is), but he’s the one that she’s always dreamed of.

And maybe it’s too soon to jump to these conclusions. Maybe she should be more careful before diving headfirst into this relationship, before putting all of her weight into it. She should be gentle with herself; she’s had her heart broken before and she never wants it to end up that way again. At least not if she can help it.

“I didn’t mean to end up this way,” she repeats again as they stand in the entryway to her flat that she’s opened. “I guess that it’s been a while since I drank.”

What she means to say is that she never really does. (Y/N) rarely has time to let herself relax between school and work, so much so that a night like tonight is a rarity. It’s unique, different in the way that she’s finally letting herself relax. And she won’t deny that it feels good to do so.

“No harm done,” Harry assures her. “I’m glad that you enjoyed yourself.”

“I hope that you did, too?” It might be the alcohol that’s making her so brave, but she doesn’t mind. She needed that extra push, that step towards confidence. It feels nice to have the ability to be brave and suddenly, all at once she understands the appeal of being an alcoholic. If only she had time for that type of lifestyle.

He’s nodding sweetly, gently. His head isn’t moving too much and she’s thankful for it. If he were to move too quickly, too abruptly, she might become dizzy with the movement. She might become sick with it, might lose herself to the quick movements. 

“I did,” he assures her softly. His voice is nothing more than a whisper and she has to strain to hear it as she flicks the lights on to illuminate the apartment behind her.

They’re standing in the in-between now. It’s hesitant, unsure. The air is thick with a tension that, even sober, she wouldn’t totally know how to remedy. She’s dizzied by her thoughts and she wants to sit down, to lie down and put this day to bed. But the sober part of her doesn’t want to see this evening’s end, as if staying up past midnight makes yesterday stick around. 

A part of her wants to invite him in for the night and open herself up like that. The louder pieces of her don’t want to do something that brash; even though the evening has been lovely, Harry’s still essentially a stranger. She can’t remember his last name and she can’t piece together what his family’s law firm was called. She doesn’t know how old his brothers are and she doesn’t know where he lives. Even though he’s gathered a lifetime’s worth of information from her, she doesn’t know anything about him. She’s barely begun to scratch the surface of who he is.

“There’s going to be a next time, right?” If she were wistful, she’d imagine that there was a hopeful air to his voice. If she were paying better attention, she’d have known that he was hopeful. He wanted there to be another date, too.

“I think you played your cards right tonight,” she laughs. “I just hope that I did.”

His hand touches hers and it strikes her as odd that this is the first time that he’s touched her, really. They didn’t hold hands walking, so unless the times that he was holding her up in order to help her get to her flat count, this is the first time all night that he’s invaded her personal space. She can’t say that she really minds.

“You definitely did.”

And then his lips are on her cheek. There is no before, no hesitation, just the rush of his lips against her skin and the softness of his touch. She wishes that she could remember more of that moment, remember the softness of his chapped lips and how that contradiction made her feel safe. She wishes that she could remember everything about that moment, but all that she has is the tender memory of the scent of his cologne.

And somehow that will have to be enough for her.


	7. Chapter 7

Harry goes home that night and stands in front of the mirror. He looks at his reflection and wonders briefly how his life got to be this way, how he got to this point. The foundation that he so carefully placed on his skin before the date is wearing off and coming off to reveal the redness beneath it. His father hit him so hard that it left a mark, red and blotchy.

It’s been a few days and the imprint from his ring still hasn’t left his cheek. He had to watch YouTube tutorials on how to apply the cheap drug-store foundation that had looked fake. He wonders how (Y/N) didn’t notice the change in his skin-tone or if she did but was too polite to say anything.

He thinks back on their night and feels his heart flutter with the realization that it was their own private world. This was not the world of his father and brothers, it was not the world of his family and friends in the mob. It is a simpler world, one much more gentle and understand.

Her world is one of forgiveness and sweetness. It is one of love and genuine kindness. She does not take with the expectation that he will give, there is no equal exchange in her eyes. It’s so simple, such an easy way to live that Harry wonders why he hasn’t before. It’s a world that he could fall into with such ease, such complacency if it wasn’t for his ties to the London mob.

(Y/N) still has no idea that he’s her soulmate and he feels bad. He wants her to know more than anything, wants to call her his love and say that she’s the only one for him. He wants to call her darling, love. He wants to call her his sweet girl with the understanding that she’s the only one for him. Harry wants so badly for her to know that she’s his soulmate and that he’s hers, but he’s afraid of the repercussions.

He’s afraid that once she knows, she’ll hate him. He’s afraid that she’ll run from him and that he won’t be able to blame her. If he was in her position, he would have already been long gone. Harry Holland is not the sweetness that she deserves.

Knowing her for such a short span of time has already led him to understand what type of person she needs to be with. She needs to be with someone loving, someone tender and sweet who can put her first. She needs to be with someone that can give her the love and gentleness that she deserves. She deserves all of this and more and Harry wishes, he wishes so deeply that he could be that for her. But realistically he knows that love doesn’t change people and that it won’t be able to change him.

He’s terrified that he’ll always be the callous man that he is right now. He’s afraid that he’ll never be able to truly love her in the way that she deserves because he’s always been this way and he’s afraid that he’ll never change. 

Harry’s been staring into the mirror for the past fifteen minutes when Sam finally knocks on the door. When no response comes, he pushes open the door and leans against its frame. He studies his twin in silence for a moment, reverent to the truth that they’re both facing. Harry will not be the only one to receive their father’s wrath when he finds out (for there is no if in this situation, there is only the present moment where their father is unaware and the future where he is).

All of the Holland boys will feel their father’s fury when he finds out that Harry’s been meeting with his soulmate.

“You saw her tonight, then?” Sam asks. 

His eyes meet Harry’s in the mirror and Harry can’t read him. He can’t tell if Sam is excited for him, if he’s mad. He can’t read the difference between the two emotions and it’s all he wants in that moment. To know whether or not his twin is upset with him would bring him a sense of comfort; it would mean an ally in the war that will ensue.

“I did.”

There’s no bullshit in this moment, no beating around the bush. There’s no need to when Sam knows him better than anyone else in this house. Sam knows his ins and outs better than anyone else in a way that’s almost frightening.

He knew when Harry broke his wrist in primary school without seeing him. He knew when Harry had broken up with his first girlfriend without asking him.

There was a shift in the air between them when something monumental happened, a sort of twin telepathy that wasn’t quite as strong or evident as people make it out to be. 

He sees Sam’s shoulders drop in what he assumes to be defeat. His brother shakes his head and lets out a soft sigh as the air thickens between them.

“You know that you’re not just writing your own suicide note with this, right?” Sam warns, his voice so low in his throat that Harry has to strain to hear it. “You’re signing a death certificate for all of us when dad finds out.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Even though Sam’s not accusing him of anything, Harry is still defensive. His tone is low and angry as his shoulders square and his jaw sets. “I was supposed to just live my life without my soulmate and let her think that some part of her was fucked up? That a piece of her didn’t deserve love?”

The idea seems so absurd that Harry nearly scoffs with it. Sam’s never met (Y/N), he realizes, but if he had Harry knows that he would be on the same page. There’s never been a girl so pure, so innocent as (Y/N). And while he doesn’t really understand how the universe could pair them together, how a God could do this to them, he’s not going to ruin their chances at happiness. He couldn’t do that to her.

“For the purposes of self-preservation, yes,” Sam growls. “Do you want to fucking die, Harry? You know dad’s policies on love. You know how mum’s death tore him apart and I know how badly it ruined you, too. It ruined all of us, but you were closest with her.

“How are you going to let yourself go through that pain again? Do you think that this girl is any different from mum, that you can somehow save her from that fate? We’re involved in the fucking mob, Harry. She’s not even safe right now if someone saw the two of you, which they probably did. They’ll go after her to get to you, to us. And dad won’t let you save her.”

There’s a thick, saturated silence that sits between the two twins. Everything that Sam is saying is true and valid and Harry knows that, he understands it well. That doesn’t mean that the pill is any easier to swallow, though. 

“I’m already going through that pain, Sam. If I don’t get to be a part of her life, I lose her just like we lost mum. The problem won’t solve itself if we just ignore it, and I don’t want to know that I’ve ruined someone’s life just because I didn’t make an effort.”

“And what if she doesn’t want anything to do with you after you tell her how you didn’t turn around when you first met her? What then, Harry?” Sam is scoffing as he shakes his head, his eyes dark as he looks at his brother. 

Harry doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. He doesn’t want this girl to come between him and his brother, his twin brother, but she’s not just any girl. (Y/N) is his soulmate and there has to be some weight in that in this universe, there has to be some credit to that.

He turns back to the mirror and almost groans in disgust at the way the mark looks on his pale skin. It’s red and fading into an ugly bruise that Harry can barely stand to look at. He wants to cover it up with drug-store foundation again, wants to try and forget about it as best he can, but he knows that his dad would never let him rest if he knew that his son was wearing makeup to cover his bruise.

“I’m not letting her go, Sam.” Harry speaks when he notices that Sam is still standing in the room. “It might cause the third world war, but I’m not letting her go just because dad thinks that I should. His past pain shouldn’t be my present strife, it shouldn’t be our cross to bear. We lost her, too, and we deserve a little bit of good in our lives. And if (Y/N) is that for me, why should I turn her away? What should stop me from getting to know her and trying to get her to understand why I couldn’t turn around?”

He knows that he’s being too wistful. Harry knows that this type of hopefulness doesn’t hold any weight in their family, that it doesn’t hold any real credit. Hope doesn’t get you to tomorrow. A bright outlook doesn’t keep the bullet from hitting you or your father’s hand from striking your cheek. It just makes the bullet’s entry a little bit softer, makes the blow a little bit softer. Hope doesn’t keep the bad from happening, it just makes it easier to deal with.

Harry catches Sam’s scowl in the reflection of the mirror before he can wipe it off his face. He shakes his head as he turns around to leave the bathroom, but Harry knows that Sam isn’t going to let him have the last word. That’s not how his twin works and it’s not how he’s ever worked, and Harry knows that.

“When the world comes crashing down around you, don’t expect any of us to stick around and help you piece it back together. You’ve made your own bed, so you’re going to have to learn to lie in it.”


	8. Chapter 8

(Y/N) wakes up the morning after her date with Harry to her reality. She has to go to class again and doesn’t have another day off from work for the foreseeable future. Her life looks bleak in the post-Harry haze that she’s living in. 

While she knows that her being tipsy shouldn’t have ruined things between her and Harry (realistically, anyways), she still worries. Maybe the kiss on the cheek at the end of the night was just a friendly gesture? Maybe he didn’t much care for her?

Still, she finds herself drafting a text to him on her way to class. She’s on the crowded London underground heading to campus as she does, suddenly uneasy about her communication skills. She knows that if he opens their messages at any point, he’ll see the three dots indicating that she’s typing, and she fears that. With that in mind, she opens a new note on her phone to prevent that awkward situation.

(Y/N) has never really been on a date before. Harry is the first person that she’s been interested in long-term, the first person that she’s really wanted to see more of. He seems so genuine and sweet, so self-assured and kind that it makes her want him as a permanent figure in her life. Even if they’re just friends—which might break her—she wants him in her life. She wants him permanently, wants him to be someone that she gets to see grow into someone better than he already is. 

She’s trying to phrase this in a way that doesn’t come across creepy when she reaches her stop. Temporarily reprieved from her attempts to communicate with the object of her affections, she begins the short walk to campus.

Should she say something simple? An easy,  _I really enjoyed last night_. Or would that be too blasé, too easy? Would it make him understand how deeply her affections have begun to run for him? How do you properly convey that, anyways? This is all a new ballpark for her, a new game that she’s trying to learn to play when she’s never even been briefed on the rules before.

She slides into her usual seat in the lecture hall for her first class. She’s staring at the nots on her phone, a scrambled essay on how much she enjoyed the previous night with Harry. How is she supposed to act like she wants another night like that when her schedule won’t allow it for the next month? She’s never going to get a weekend off of work unless she asks for it, and her current bank account won’t allow that. 

On a whim that she knows she’ll regret later, (Y/N) sends a message. She doesn’t let herself think about it after she sends it—not too much anyways—or she might implode. She worries that it’s not enough, that it doesn’t accurately convey how much she wants to see him. But she supposes that nothing besides her being in front of her, asking her out once more will allow him to truly know how much that idea excites her.

_Really enjoyed last night & hope that the stars might align so that we can have another like it x_

* * *

After sending that message, (Y/N) had turned her phone off. She hadn’t wanted to know what Harry had to say in response to that and had wanted only to focus on her courses for the day. When she’s back on the underground after her classes, she turns her phone back on to see the messages that he’s sent in response.

They’re all positive and she can hear his voice speaking the words to her. She can hear the low rumble of his voice in his chest as he tells her that he,  _“really [hopes] that it can work out,”_  and that he,  _“really [wants] another night like [their] last.”_

 

She can feel the heat in her cheeks as she reads the messages, her eyes bright with love and adoration and a newfound joy that she’d never discovered before. She never knew what  _talking to someone_  really entailed, what it meant in the scope of a relationship. But now that she’s living that reality, she can understand the appeal. 

There’s a warm rush in her chest as she talks to Harry that night. There’s a shy happiness that she can’t shake, that she’s fallen in love with. She loves how shy he’s made her; how easy Harry seems to be able to make her happy. They haven’t been talking about anything in particular: just about their days and the weather and their families. They’ve been talking about nothing and the everything that falls in between the spaces that it leaves. She can’t remember the last time that she’s connected with someone so easily, she can’t remember the last time that she’s laughed this much and felt so at ease.

There must be a change in her when she gets to work because Miranda gives her a strange look. Her brown eyes are heavy with a curiosity that (Y/N) knows isn’t going to die easily. It’s something that’s going to continue to come up in conversation over the course of the night, something that (Y/N) is going to have to deal with. 

She knows Miranda well enough to know that curiosity doesn’t sit well with her. She’s the type of person that you can’t say never mind to, that you can’t dismiss a thought from. She’s curious and she doesn’t do well with unanswered questions.

Sure enough, about halfway into the shift, Miranda comes up to (Y/N) as she’s wiping down the wand on the latte machine. The night has been slow as most Monday nights are, though there’s been some bursts of activities. It hasn’t been ridiculous to the point that she’s needed Miranda’s assistance, though, as rare as that is to receive. Miranda rarely comes out from the office unless there’s a real rush and there’s only one employee working, though she complains about it for hours afterwards. She’s an angry sort of worker and it makes (Y/N) wonder why she even bothered to start this business when it so obviously makes her so unhappy.

Miranda leans against the counter that (Y/N) is standing at, her eyes scanning the girl’s features. Her face is unreadable, something unusual for Miranda to be, and it leaves (Y/N) wondering just how well she really knows her manager. 

“You seem to be happy tonight,” Miranda notes with an observant gaze. 

Her eyes roam the younger girl’s face for what (Y/N) assumes to be any signs of shock or surprise from how observant she’s been with this statement. It’s not as if (Y/N) was really trying to hide her good mood by any means, not like she was taking great strides to make her mirth hidden.

“I am.” In moments like these, it’s best to keep away from snarky comments. They won’t get her anywhere, they won’t save her from whatever conclusion Miranda’s drawn.

“Did you go out on a date with milky-coffee-guy?” 

The nickname makes (Y/N) cringe. Sure, it’s what she originally called Harry, but that thought doesn’t make it any easier to come to terms with just how mean it was of her to do. She was mean to him without needing to be and it hurts her to realize, makes her sad to realize how rash her judgment of him had been. She hadn’t meant to be mean to him and she knows that Harry will never know—at least, she hopes that he won’t discover her cruel nicknames for him—but it still hurts her to hear someone else talk about him like that. Especially with the condescending tone that Miranda has.

“I did!” Still, (Y/N) doesn’t let her tone betray anything besides the joy she’s feeling after going out with him. She won’t let Miranda’s anger take away from her genuine happiness or good mood. “It was really good, as you can probably tell. I’m living on a high right now.”

As (Y/N) chuckles to relieve the tension that she feels creeping between her and Miranda, she notices that Miranda’s eyes are focused on a point at the counter. She figures that there’s a customer that she hasn’t noticed given that her back is facing the counter as she finishes cleaning the latte machine, but the smirk on Miranda’s face speaks to another truth.

When (Y/N) turns around, she’s faced with Harry. She can feel her eyes widen and her cheeks heat up with embarrassment, as he definitely just heard what she had to say about their date. She warms uncomfortably at the thought and lets it wash over her until she’s breathing it and there’s nothing else that she can do. She lets out a soft sigh and steps to the counter to grab a medium cup to get his coffee started as she talks to him.

“I assume that you heard everything that I just said?” She asks in a defeated sigh, her eyes heavy with the realization. 

“I did,” Harry says in a teasing tone. 

His brown eyes are warm with unspoken laughter, his face bathed in the light of his boyish grin. While (Y/N) is glad that he’s happy about her enjoying their date, she’s also embarrassed under the weight of his new knowledge.

“And I’m glad that you’re, uh… _living on a high_ , you said?” His boyish grin is taking on a teasing gleam as his eyes meet hers. 

She almost groans at how pleased he sounds and how much of her conversation with Miranda he heard. She’s stirring the milk and sugar into his coffee as she tries to fight back to embarrassment that’s rising in her stomach. (Y/N) refuses to say anything until he lets the thoughts of how much she enjoyed their date die. She wants him to move on to something different, to save her from her own embarrassment. 

When she hands him his coffee and rings it up in the register, she watches his boyish grin transform into a smirk. “You’re charging me this time?”

“Oh, I most definitely am,” she assures him through a dry laugh. “Not only have you been teasing me after listening in on a private conversation that I had with my manager, but said manager is definitely going to watch the tapes to see how our conversation plays out.”

Harry laughs at that and the sound is something that (Y/N) wants engraved in her memory. It’s robust and deep in his chest and it shakes his form as it washes over him entirely. He’s smiling at her, his expression bright as the laughter dies in his chest and leaves him relaxed in front of her. He pays for his coffee but doesn’t leave; rather, he stands in front of her and sips at his drink as he studies her embarrassed features.

“So, d’you think that the stars are going to align for us anytime soon?” His tone is hopeful, and she lets that idea wash over her—he wants to see her again just as badly as she wants to see him. 

“I’m not sure,” (Y/N) admits through a defeated sigh. “I’m still at uni and I’m working almost every day after class and every weekend until I’m dead.” 

She sees his shoulders sag at that confession and it suddenly hits her how much that sounds like an excuse. She wants to see him again and everything in her is screaming for her to just tell him that, to just admit that she wants to see him again. To see Harry so upset on account of her words has her breaking for him, has her heart opening in front of him as she stands there.

“I’m being honest!” She assures him in one quick breath, her words jumbling together to the point that she fears that he can’t understand her. “Really, Harry, I promise that I’m being honest with you. I’m scheduled to work the closing shift every night except for Thursdays and Fridays, but then I work Saturday and Sunday morning until about noon or so. And then I usually do homework that I’ve been putting off all week or take a nap since I’m not sleeping much during the week. I’d really, really love for the stars to align for us again but I…I’m really swamped right now and I’m sorry.”

She can feel the tears welling behind her eyes and she’s blinking them away as quickly as she can, a soft breath leaving her as she tries to collect herself. She doesn’t want him to see her cry this early on in their almost-relationship, nor does she want to ruin the makeup that she applied before her shift. Her mascara is too expensive to cry off.

“What if I brought some takeout to your flat?” He offers in a soft tone. “Sunday night, maybe? We could put on a movie and have you take a break for a bit, do it earlier in the evening so that you still have time to work after I leave and before I get over?”

Harry seems nervous after this idea has been spoken into her reality. He seems scared that she might reject it, that she might deny the possibility of them together and he doesn’t want that. She knows that she certainly wouldn’t want him to reject such a tender, romantic notion.

And it’s a sweet idea, really. It won’t cost her anything, though that makes her a bit upset since she doesn’t want him to live under the impression that he has to buy for both of them on every date. She wants to cover them sometimes, though not at the same extent that he did on their first date. Maybe after a few nights out she could have paid him back for the night at the fancy restaurant with the food that she couldn’t pronounce, but she could never budget something like that for just one meal. She doesn’t know how he did, either; not that it’s really her place to know that, anyways.

“That sounds…” She draws in a breath and lets a lazy smile wash over her features, her eyes closing in content at the idea. “That sounds really nice, Harry.”

She can imagine it now: a lazy evening spent curled up on her second-hand couch, some dumb movie playing on the television that neither of them are really paying attention to. She needs that type of reprieve from the hectic cycle of her life and she trusts that he probably does, too. And it sets her at ease to know that he wants to spend those few hours away from his busy life with her.

“It’s a date, then?” Harry sounds hopeful, his eyes bright with an affection that she can’t shake as he looks at her.

“It’s a date.”


	9. Chapter 9

Harry returns home to a weighted silence. Paddy isn’t running around with friends in the yard after school, his father isn’t grumbling in his office. Tom isn’t watching a sports match on the television, Sam isn’t playing piano in the living room. The silence is so thick and deafening that Harry wants to scream.

He’s never been good with silence. It’s been hard for him to handle the quiet ever since his mum passed and this type of silence hung thick for months. It’s been a long time since this type of quiet has sat in the house, a long time since he’s walked in the house to find it dead. No life dares to tread in these four walls on these days, no words dare to be uttered on these heavy afternoons.

The air feels thick as he makes his way to his room to take off the foundation he’s caked on. The bruising is fading more and more every day, but he doesn’t want to risk (Y/N) seeing it when he goes to visit her at work. He doesn’t want her to know quite yet, doesn’t want to have to explain why he was hit. It would open a floodgate of questions that he doesn’t know how to bullshit, even though she doesn’t deserve the bullshit. She deserves honesty, but Harry can’t give that to her. 

She deserves someone who can love her. She deserves someone who won’t have to hide her, deserves more than what he’ll give her. She doesn’t deserve to be someone’s secret, even though he won’t be able to keep it for long. (Y/N) deserves someone who can protect her and Harry’s not that person. He’s never going to be that man, the one that she deserves.

He catches sight of his dad in his office as he heads to his bedroom and tries to be as quiet as possible. Somehow, he knows that this heavy silence is because he’s been figured out. His dad knows that he met her, that he’s been meeting her. There are no secrets in this family, there never have been. Not when your dad can figure out what you’re thinking just by looking at you or asking his men to trail you. Harry might have grown up in the mob, but that doesn’t mean that he fully knows or understands how to make himself invisible like he needs. 

Just when Harry thinks that he’s gotten past his dad, he hears him clear his throat. He’s just past the doorway to his father’s office and he freezes, his eyes wide and worried about if his father is going to call him in. A piece of him knows that his dad is going to call him into his office, that he’s going to be found out. This discussion is going to happen now, and the other shoe is going to drop. 

“Harry.” His father’s voice is flat, unamused as he waits for his son to come into the room.

Harry knows that this discussion isn’t going to go well. It won’t end in a good discussion, won’t end in a mutual agreement that benefits Harry. He’ll leave with an ultimatum that he can already hear in his head, echoing in his father’s voice.

_“It’s us or the girl.”_

He knows that there’s no arguing this. There’s no saving himself from this fate, no better existence that he’s going to be able to figure out. He either buys into what his father wants him to do and stays with his family, or he spends his life with (Y/N). There’s no best of both worlds, no easiness that Harry will be able to talk himself into. It’s a fate that he has to live with and something that he’s coming to understand slowly but surely. 

Knowing all of this, Harry steps into his father’s office. He pushes the door open and looks around, noting the lack of family pictures on the wall. Ever since Nikki died, there’s been no family pictures. All of them are gone, probably burned in a fire. Harry can’t remember the last time that he saw a family picture or the last time that one was taken.

“You called me?” Harry’s trying to play this off in a nonchalant fashion, trying to be blasé and calm about the fact that his entire life is about to come crashing down around him.

“Will you order takeout for dinner? I’m swamped in work and Sam is out and God knows that you, Tom, and Paddy can’t cook worth shit.”

While he’s surprised by the bizarre request, surprised that his father isn’t confronting him about the fact that he’s been seeing (Y/N), he doesn’t let it show. At least, he hopes he doesn’t let the surprise read on his face. He nods his understanding and smiles softly as he makes his way out of the office.

“The usual, I assume?” He’s trying to be easy about this and make his tone sound like there’s nothing bizarre about his father’s words; he’s trying to be calm, collected, and he hopes that it’s working.

Whether or not he’s being calm and collected, Harry reasons he’ll never know. He leaves the office after Dominic hums his agreement to his son’s statement and lets himself go to his bedroom to breathe. At the very least, his father didn’t note the difference in his skin tone. He didn’t note the fact (at least not verbally) that his son was wearing foundation. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that Harry’s trying to hold onto. 

If his father can be okay with him wearing foundation, maybe he can come around to him being with his soulmate. Maybe he can get used to (Y/N). Realistically, Harry knows that isn’t reasonable; but the quiet part of him, the part that he won’t let out too much, believes that it just might be.

* * *

They eat dinner in relative silence from the boxes that the takeout came in. They don’t talk and let the silence sit heavy between them, almost as thick as it was when Harry first got home.

It’s him, Tom, Paddy, and Dominic around the table. Sam is out with friends, probably after he realized that the heavy silences were back. Harry knows that Sam can feel that type of heaviness before anyone else even begins to experience it. It’s something that he’s always admired about his twin, something that he’s always envied. Harry wishes that he was able to predict the general patterns of the family’s moods so that he could steer clear when they begin, but he knows that a wish like that is dangerous. 

Wishes like that don’t change anything. They don’t abate the bad moods or make them any more bearable for the rest of the family; a wish like that just makes it so that Harry can avoid the spells. It’s a selfish wish, but it’s still one that he clings to. It’s still one that he wants to believe in the power of so that he might get through these down periods.

Harry wonders briefly what it would be like if they were a normal family. What would they be talking about over the Chinese food that’s slowly going cold as they eat? Would they discuss the weather? Maybe they’d discuss the darkness that’s slowly creeping back over their home as they grow closer and closer to the anniversary of Nikki’s death. Maybe they’d discuss why Dominic is so fucked up that he can’t even bear the thought of his sons falling in love. Or, maybe things would be exactly as they are right now. 

Maybe nothing would have changed, and everything would still be the same, the darkness would still be an unspeakable force in their home. Maybe they’d be the same family with the same morals and the same story, just different professions. Maybe his father would be a writer, Tom might have pursued his love for theater. Maybe Paddy would have grown up in a family that didn’t shame his interests, a family that wanted him to express himself instead of suppress who he was as a person. These were all the things that Harry wished could be true but never would be, not in this lifetime.

In this lifetime, they’re a family that eats in silence over Chinese food. They’re a family that ignores feelings and pushes all of their energy into facts, the tangible things that they can base their feelings on. They’re a family that doesn’t talk about their days, that can’t express doubts in the patriarch. They’re not a normal family, but it’s something that Harry will have to live with. It’s something that he already lives with. 

“How was work today?” Tom finally asks. 

His voice breaks the tension that’s been building ever-so-slightly. The sound of it makes Harry jump slightly and look at his father with a surprised gaze as he waits for an answer that he hopes isn’t loaded, an answer that he hopes is honest and easy. Though, that’s not something that he really gets from his father. That’s not really something that comes about in the Holland household.

“It was busy,” Dominic answers through a bite of food.

 _At least fucking chew and swallow._  Harry’s thoughts are bitter and directed at his father, angry and gruff as he tries to swallow them down with every breath. He can’t have anyone knowing how he really feels about this family, his father in particular. He can’t have that type of vulnerability, can’t afford it. It’s too risky, too dangerous. It’s not something that Harry knows how to live with or thinks that he’ll ever be able to. 

For anyone to know that he hates his father would be a death sentence for all parties. This is the one secret that Harry has learned to keep, the one card that he has been able to keep to his chest for the past two years.

He loved his father before his mum died. He loved him when he saw the vulnerability in him and could call him human; but now, his father is just flesh and bones. There’s no heart to him, no warmth anymore. It’s something that everyone in the Holland household—Tessa included—has had to learn to live with.

Tessa probably took Dominic’s change the hardest. There was the man that had played ball with her as a puppy to help soothe her to sleep, there was the man that had once let her sit at his feet as he worked in his office. Those were the days when he would work with his office door open, a warm invitation to his family that they were always welcome to come in if they so pleased. Tessa didn’t have the human understanding of what Nikki’s disappearance—because that was all it could really be to the dog, a disappearance—meant for Dominic’s emotional state.

Harry wishes that he were a dog. In this moment—this heavy, weighted moment—Harry wishes that he could have little to no understanding of the human world. He wishes that he didn’t understand vulnerability and what an attractive quality that was. He wishes that he didn’t know pain and what that does to a man, a strong man at that. All at once, in a big rush of feeling that he would usually try to push away, Harry wishes that he weren’t alive.

The realization nearly makes him drop his fork in surprise. But if there’s one thing that he’s gotten good at, it’s hiding his feelings. He knows how to push down everything that he’s feeling so that it never shows, so that it never reads on his face. He’s not very good at keeping secrets, but Harry has gotten good at hiding his true feelings.

He wants to be excused from the table so that he can go think alone but knows that asking would only draw unwanted attention towards him. Dominic would ask what he was doing, why he needed to be excused in the first place. Why should his son be excused when his plate is still full? In order to be excused from dinner, you have to finish your first serving in its entirety. Waste is not something that’s permitted in Dominic’s eyes when there are people less fortunate in the world.

Harry will finish his plate. He will eat this dinner of now-cold Chinese food and stomach it as much as possible and try to put on a brave face through the half-assed conversations that will fill the spaces between bites.

But after, he’s going to call (Y/N) and live that pretend-normalcy that he fakes around her. He’ll live that normal life for a moment and let it consume him, he reasons, and let it be so real for the night that he might just forget he isn’t living that life. He wants it so badly, wants so badly to be the normal type of man that (Y/N) deserves. 

In his pretend life, he works at his family’s law firm. He files papers for his father who was harrowed and hallowed by his wife’s death but is learning and trying to cope in a healthy way. Things are still hard, little things still remind him of her, but he’s learning to love those things.

What makes you think of your mum? He imagines (Y/N) saying, voice honeyed with drowsiness and sweetened with the affection she feels for him.

And he’ll tell her the truth because this part of his pretend life is not so different from the real one that he’s living. This part of his two lives are the same, they overlap in this sense. Harry imagines that there’s other ways that they overlap, other pieces that fit together clumsily, but he has yet to find them. If he wants to make this double-life convincing to her, he knows that he needs to find or create lots of overlaps. He needs to make sure that pieces of his lives fall together to make the lies easier to live. (Y/N) doesn’t deserve to be lied to but if she’s going to be, Harry knows that she deserves to be lied to convincingly. 

* * *

(Y/N) comes home from work that night exhausted. It wasn’t busy, it wasn’t too crazy after Harry left, but every customer that came in after him just made her want him back. She wanted that easy conversation again, that fluttering in her chest. She wanted the nerves that he made her feel and she wanted to feel weightless once more with adoration. She missed him, and he hadn’t even really been there for long.

She’s cooking dinner when he calls her. It’s a bit late for dinner as the clock tells her that it’s a little past nine at night, but she hasn’t had anything to eat since lunch and she’s starved. When she sees his name flash on the screen of her phone, she nearly jumps in surprise. 

This is new; all of their conversations have either been held over text or in person. This feels intimate, new. It feels like a strange addition to a routine that she’s already fallen into, but (Y/N) can’t find it in her to complain about it.

“Hello?” She’s speaking as she fumbles to put him on speaker while stirring the sauce that she’s heating up for her pasta.

“(Y/N).” She can hear the sigh in his voice and it’s so relieved that she can almost visualize it. 

She sees his shoulders slumping, his smile forming lazily over his features as he looks at some point in the room. The visualization has her cheeks flushing and her heart stuttering in her chest in a way that she wasn’t really prepared for.

“Is everything okay?” She tries to keep the worry out of her voice, tries to push it down in her chest so that it doesn’t read quiet as easily in her tone. It feels as if it’s too early in their relationship to be showing that type of affection, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t let herself experience it.

“Better now that I’m talking to you.” 

His reply is so suave and easy that (Y/N) nearly chokes. Her hand stops stirring the pot of marinara sauce and she flounders at how easy he makes flirting seem. With her mind running a million miles an hour, she almost doesn’t pick up on the fact that she can hear his boyish smile. 

She can hear the way that he’s grinning as he speaks, obviously aware of what his words are doing to her. Harry knows very well the effect that he has on (Y/N) and she knows that it’s always going to be something that he exploits.

“Is that so?” Of all the replies that she could come up with,  _of course_  that’s the one she has to go with. Trying to salvage herself, she adds, “I’m glad that I can make things better for you so quickly.”

She feels stupid and small and vastly inexperienced in this way of living, this new confidence that she’s supposed to have. (Y/N) assumes that she has to have it, anyways, or that she should from the way that he’s talking to her. He seems to know just what to say, he seems so experienced and fluent in flirting that she feels as though she should be asking him for pointers.

The chuckle that he gives down the line makes her stomach flutter. She’s gone back to stirring the marinara sauce in the pan, if only to distract herself from the way that her heart is pounding in her chest with every beat of silence that rests between them. Phone calls have never been her strong suit and she knows that Harry isn’t going to be able to change that. 

She’s better in person, she’s even better over text. She can think about her replies over text and play it off as her just thinking about what she wants to say. In person, (Y/N) can read his facial expressions and get a clue as to what he’s feeling. Though, Harry has proven to be hard to read as he keeps most of his cards to his chest. Still, he gives her subtle clues that let her guide the conversation so that she doesn’t make a fool of herself like she knows that she’s bound to over this conversation.

“You always make my days better,” Harry says to her in a breathy voice. He’s quiet and almost hesitant down the line, but that’s only if (Y/N) is reading him right. She’s not the best judge of tone.

“Are you sure that’s not just the coffee?” She quips in earnest, her eyes bright though he can’t see them to know that.

Maybe he can hear it, though. Maybe he can hear the smile in her voice and the low, airy chuckle that she breathes when she speaks. Harry is probably better than her at reading people, though she knows it doesn’t take much to claim that title. A brick wall would probably be better at phone conversation than (Y/N) thinks that she is. 

“I’m positive that it’s not just the coffee, darling. You’ve been adding extra sugar recently and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it.”

 _Darling._ The pet-name has her heart fluttering and her eyes closing momentarily, dangerously as she holds the sauce over the stove to move it back, so it can cool for a moment while the pasta finishes cooking in the pot next to it. She almost lets out a squeal at the way that it sounds when it rolls off his tongue, almost lets herself get lost in the low tone he has and how gentle he is. She knows that this is dangerous, the type of power he’s holding over her with one simple word.

“You could’ve said something!” She defends through a bright laugh that she hopes helps her play off the way she hesitated before speaking. All because of a stupid pet-name.

“And risked ruining your perception of me?” He teases. “You obviously think I’m sweet enough that I take extra sugar.”

“Or, I think you’re bitter and need a little bit of sweetness in your life.” Her grin is bright now as she moves about her kitchen to grab a paper plate—fuck dishes tonight; she did enough of them while closing at work—and plastic silverware. 

The laugh that Harry gives through the phone warms her up. Her flat has been chilly recently as the London weather shifts from fall to winter and the heat has been out in her building for a while as her landlord procrastinates fixing it—probably due to the bill that will ensue. But the laugh that Harry gives her is enough to warm her up for months on end and she never wants him to stop. She’s infatuated with the sound of his laugh and it leaves her wondering just how many parts of him, how many pieces of his personality could make her warm up like that again. 

When the line goes silent, (Y/N) finds herself missing the warmth. She misses its brightness, its goodness. The silence is comfortable, sure, but she misses the warmth of his laughter and she doesn’t know how to get it back without being too obvious.

“What did I disrupt when I called?” He asks, his voice low and husky in a way that sends shivers through her. 

It’s not seductive, just sleep-laden and heavy. She enjoys it, but (Y/N) is coming to find that she enjoys most everything that Harry does and everything that he will do. Nothing that he could say or do would make that feeling fade, but there’s a something in the space that leaves. There’s a something in the gap of the nothing that she might not love, that she might not accept. But for now, she lives in blissful ignorance and she lives in her love of his laughter.

“I was cooking dinner,” she says in a voice that she hopes makes him feel the same way that his voice makes her feel. “Just got back from my shift at the café and wanted to make some pasta before I went to bed.”

“You boil the water, I assume?” He’s laughing down the line at his own joke that she doesn’t quite understand.

“What idiot wouldn’t?” Her genuine question makes him laugh harder and her chest swells with a mixture of pride and confusion.

“Me.”

That word has her flushing with a sudden sense of shame. She really just called him stupid. The boy that she likes, she just called him stupid without knowing it. She’s laughing at her own foolishness in a way that she hopes might numb the embarrassment and shame that’s mingling in her chest.

“I didn’t mean stupid!” She’s about to continue when his laughter interrupts her, his voice cutting through.

“It’s okay, darling.” The pet name makes her heart flutter and she closes her eyes to let it all soak in as he keeps speaking. “I can be quite daft sometimes, I know. You’d cook for me, I assume, and I’ll never try to impress you by cooking.”

“So, you’re going to try and impress me?” She’s blushing as she serves herself the pasta and sauce, a lonely dinner for one that doesn’t feel so lonely with Harry on the phone.

“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve got to win your affections somehow, don’t I?”

What she wants to tell him is that he already has them. He had them all from the first moment that he entered the café, from the first moment that she started talking to him. With one word, he had all of her affection. She was his and he didn’t even know it—or he did, and he was trying to be modest.

Instead of confessing all of this, (Y/N) takes a bite of pasta and lets a smile grace her features. She lets out a soft hum through her bite and relishes in the sound of his breathing through the line. It’s soft and present and it’s soothing her, forcing her to constantly remind herself not to fall asleep. She still has homework to do, dishes to clean from dinner, and a shower to take before she can do that. And it’s only Monday.

“Stop that!” Her words are a playful accusation.

She can hear his pause, his hesitation. There’s a real fear in him, she realizes, that he’s done something wrong. Then, she laughs, both out of nerves and in hope that he might realize she’s joking with him.

(Y/N) can tell that it makes him relax. She can tell that he softens under that sound, that he relaxes in its wake. 

“What was I doing wrong, darling?” The genuine concern in his voice makes her heart melt and nearly stop in her chest as she hums down the line.

“Your breathing.” She nearly stops her thought there and laughs at how mean that would be, how it would sound like you’re breathing instead of your. “It’s so calming and I was about to fall asleep on the couch. I still have some homework to finish up for tomorrow, dishes to clean from dinner. I can’t sleep yet, but I’m sure I could have with how calming your breathing is.”

When Harry speaks again, (Y/N) can hear the smile in his voice. “I’m glad to know that I have a calming effect on you.”

There are so many other affects that Harry has on (Y/N) that are left unspoken. Ones that she’s too timid to admit, ones that she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to. When she saw him in his suit on the night of their first date, she’d wanted him then and there. She’d wanted to skip the reservations and go straight to desert, as cliché as it was. She hadn’t wanted anyone else to see him looking so good, looking so flawlessly handsome, and he wasn’t even hers.

And even if he was hers, if they were officially dating, she wouldn’t control him. (Y/N) has never been the type of girl that has wanted to hole her significant other away from the world and keep them to herself. She’s never wanted to be the possessive, jealous girlfriend. Where others find jealousy endearing and attractive, something that can spark an interesting night in the bedroom, (Y/N) has always found it childish.

She wouldn’t own Harry. He’s his own person, an adult man that controls his own actions and feelings. She has no say or control over what he does now, and her being his girlfriend wouldn’t change that. If he flirted with someone else to make her jealous—if anyone pulled something like that—it would be a deal breaker for (Y/N). Jealousy isn’t synonymous with lust for her and she hopes that it will never be the only thing that she can rely on to spark her arousal.

Simply put, (Y/N) had wanted to keep Harry to herself that night. Not out of a jealous, protective feeling, but out of reverence. She had wanted to pay homage to him, to worship him that night in a way that wasn’t safe for the public to see. For him to look that good was a crime and she had wanted him to pay a price for it.

“What are you thinking about?” His voice is a low, raspy drawl once more and she suddenly imagines him lying down in bed, getting ready to sleep. The thought makes her heart flutter as she realizes that she was the last thing he thought of that night and the last person that he had wanted to talk to before calling it a day.

And there’s so much that she could say in response to that question, so much that she could answer with. But rather than fabricate some lie or try to make her thoughts appear deeper than they are, she settles for the truth.

“You.” Her voice is softer and more alluring than she had intended for it to be.

She doesn’t want their conversation to get too risqué, she doesn’t want to cross that line with him right now. Especially not while she’s eating pasta in her coffee-stained clothes at nine at night.

“I’m thinking of our first date and how good it was. It’s going to be really hard for us to top that, won’t it?” 

 _Us._  She chooses that word deliberately, uses it to suggest that she’s never going to put all of the pressure of date-nights on him. That wouldn’t be fair and, besides, she already knows what she wants to do for their second date. She wants it to be more low-key, more laid back than their first. Not that she regrets any of that night—that’s impossible when Harry is in the picture—but simply that she wants to do something not as expensive.

She can hear Harry’s smile through the line. Her own is bright and happy as she thinks about what they might do, where they might go.

“Do you want another date?” Harry sounds nervous as he speaks, and it makes her heart break to know. It hurts her to know that he doesn’t think she’d want to go out with him again.

“I’d be crazy not to.”


	10. Chapter 10

Harry doesn’t know how he’s going to tell her that she’s his soulmate. He doesn’t know how that’s going to pan out for either of them, how he’ll break it to his family. Thinking about it logically, he knows that there’s no way that she’s going to want to be with him after all of this. When everything is left out to dry, all of his cards on the table before her, he doesn’t know why she’d ever even want to see him again.

Before he can tell his family and even attempt to break it to them, he has to tell (Y/N). What’s the point in telling his family that he found his soulmate if she doesn’t even want to be with him in the end?

There’s a more rational part of him, though, that hasn’t really had the opportunity to speak. A part of him that knows that she’d never leave him when everything is said and done; that’s not who she is.

From their few weeks of encounters, their handful of conversations and interactions, Harry has learned that she is a rational type of person. Emotion sometimes plagues her judgment and clouds it to the point that she can’t see around it, but she’s never been brash. She has sometimes stumbled over her words in order to get a point across, but she’s never been mean about it. In fact, she’s been kind.

He thinks back to his time in the café with her, to the time that she’d hastened to clarify why the stars wouldn’t be aligning for their next date anytime soon. She hadn’t been mad that he’d assumed that she didn’t like him; she’d only wanted to clarify.

And while their scenarios are very different—hers a brief misunderstanding based on miscommunication, his being a continuous and blatant form of dishonesty—they still have common ground. They’re both forms of miscommunication. One is just far less severe than the other.

He doesn’t expect it to go over easily, of course. He just doesn’t know how badly it’s going to go, or how soon everything is going to come crashing down on him.

* * *

(Y/N) has noticed these men for the past few weeks. She’s seen them patrolling around the shop, taken their orders as they came in. She’s watched them for about two weeks, seen enough of them to know that they’re watching her. They’ve been watching her.

She doesn’t know what to do about any of this. She’s always heard horror-stories about women being stalked, but now she is. And what if she’s wrong? What if she’s just being crazy and none of this matters, none of this means anything?

(Y/N) knows that she’s more anxious than the average person. That’s not a fact that she’s ever tried to hide about herself; rather, it’s something that she almost prides herself on. She’s always very aware of her surroundings, always very sure of herself in any type of area. But, she also knows that some of this anxiety is uncalled for. Some of it isn’t necessary.

And maybe this is the type of scenario where it isn’t. Maybe she doesn’t need to be anxious for once; maybe her brain is just telling her that she has to be. It’s this type of thinking that has her chewing on her lip behind the counter.

She hasn’t moved to stock anything recently. Miranda went home early, having chosen to let (Y/N) close up shop tonight. There are things that need to be done, still; the floors need to be swept and mopped, trash needs to be taken out. But none of it sounds like a good idea right now.

She’s going to have to walk home, she realizes. She’s going to have to walk home in the dark, probably passing by these men. It’s not a long walk, sure, but it’s enough time for one of those men—who are far stronger and much more powerful than she is—to pick her up and take her somewhere.

But, maybe it’s just her brain playing tricks on her. Maybe she’s being overly anxious. Still, that doesn’t eradicate the fact that she’s anxious. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s stressing over this.

Then, she realizes that she can call Harry. It hits her suddenly, the solution feeling so easy that it’s almost stupid. She can just call him. She can just ask him to drive her home, or even to walk her home. Maybe she’s being bothersome, but at the end of the day, it’s a good test as to whether or not he’s going to be a long-term relationship for her. If he can’t handle this moment of anxiety, then he can’t handle her.

Her phone is in her hand in minutes. She’s pulled up his contact information and she’s chewing on her lip as she calls him, waiting for him to pick up.

“‘Ello?” His voice is heavy over the phone and for a moment she worries that she’s woken him up. But it’s only seven-thirty, why would he be asleep?

“Sorry if I’m bothering you,” her voice is hurried, rushed, anxious; nothing like the calmingly low timber of his. “I just…I know it’s sudden, and if you have plans for tonight or you can’t it’s okay, but I don’t feel very safe walking home tonight and…would you mind, y’know? Like, either walking me home or driving me? Really, I don’t care if you ride a bike and make me walk behind you, I just…I don’t feel safe tonight, it’s stupid and I’m probably being too sensitive, but like…do you mind?”

Harry lets her get everything out. He lets her ramble on, lets her try to explain herself even though she doesn’t have to. He’ll take any excuse to see her again, really. 

“Shop closes at eight, yeah?” 

“Yeah, I mean I’ll probably be a while since I haven’t done trash or anything, but…”

“I’ll sit in the parking lot, alright? Drive you home whenever you’re done. I’d wait a lifetime for you if you needed me to.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warning:** this chapter discusses guns & people carrying guns. also, please remember that i’m from the united states & i only know about UK gun laws through google searches & basic research. if i get anything wrong, please feel free to correct me!!

Harry doesn’t wind up sitting in the parking lot. (Y/N) lets him into the lobby while she sweeps and mops, though she knows that if—and when—Miranda watches the security footage back she’ll get an earful. She doesn’t care, though; having him sit in the parking lot and wait for her just felt weird. He was so close to her, yet so far away; she didn’t want him there, she wanted him here. She needed him in the here, though she can’t quite articulate what that means.

But, he doesn’t seem to mind it. He’s scrolling through his phone as she finishes up stocking and throwing away old product that had been on the shelf. When she leaves, the bakers will be on their way in to make everything for tomorrow. That thought in itself is comforting, too, since she’ll have to take the night’s trash out in a bit. With both Harry in the lobby and the bakers on their way, she knows that she’s safe.

And maybe she feels a bit silly for calling Harry now. But, she knows that he doesn’t mind; despite his genuine kindness, he doesn’t strike her as the type of person that would go out of his way to do something just to be polite. She sees it in the way that he’s scrolling through his phone now, the way that he’s hunched over himself at the table out in the lobby. He’s barely said a word to her since he came into the store besides their initial greetings.

Not that (Y/N) minds, really. At the end of the day, he’s doing something that he doesn’t have to do for her. He even let her vent her concerns to him on the phone for that brief moment, something that she knows he didn’t have to do. His voice was calm and easy over the line in a way that she hadn’t expected it to be; most people don’t know what to do when someone that they’re talking to is having an anxiety attack. Most people don’t know what it’s like to even have an anxiety attack, but the way that Harry handled her freak-out on the phone makes her believe that he might have some first-hand experience with them.

“Harry?” She calls out from behind the counter, waiting until he turns his head to look at her before she continues. There’s a moment’s hesitation when he does look back at her, though, because she can see something in his eyes that she’s never seen before.

There’s panic behind his eyes and she doesn’t know what to do. Is it because of her? Is it because of something else? Is there anything that she can do to help him? All of this takes only a moment to rush through her head before she sucks in a breath and continues on to speak.

“I’m going to take the trash out. I should be right back, yeah? If not, you probably know what happened.” Her tone is surprisingly light for such a heavy insinuation.

She’s trying to speak lightly of the fact that she could be kidnapped. She doesn’t want him to believe that she will be—she doesn’t even really believe it, either—but she wants to speak lightly about it. It’s a coping mechanism of hers, a way that she comforts herself from the harshness of reality that so often hits her.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come out with you?” He offers, getting ready to stand up.

She pauses for a moment, thinking over the prospect of him following her outside. It might appease the small voice in the back of her head, or it might just be needy and over-the-top of her. Still, she appreciates the offer.

“How about you just stand at the door?” She offers. “The dumpster is at the end of the parking lot, so it won’t be too bad. I should be fine, but I don’t want you going out of your way or anything just because I’m needy and overly anxious…”

Harry shakes his head, but stands to go watch her take out trash from the entryway of the store. “You’re not being needy or too anxious,” he assures her. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have come here at all.”

* * *

 

They begin the drive back to her apartment after she takes out the trash. It was uneventful, but Harry knows that she appreciates the fact that he kept watch over her. She won’t say it, but they both know it. And that’s going to be enough for him in the moment.

Her hand is in his and he knows that his car is going to smell of coffee and donuts for the next few days. He’ll make up an excuse if his father has to use it, but he’ll know. He and his brothers will know that she was there and that he’s not giving her up.

All night, while she’s been closing up shop, Harry’s been trying to get a lead on the guys that are watching her. It probably wasn’t his best move to come and take her back to her apartment—it definitely wasn’t his best move—but he wanted her to feel validated. He knows what it’s like to have your fears made fun of, he knows what it’s like to be called over-dramatic and frightful. And he never wants (Y/N) to believe that she’s any of those things in his eyes.

He hasn’t been able to find anything on them, though. He’s contacted a few sources, a few family friends to see if they could help him sort it out. And they can’t; they don’t have any idea who these guys are. They’ve never heard of anyone matching the description that he managed to get (Y/N) to give him, they’ve never heard of the types of guns that she described on their hips. That’s another thing, too—they didn’t even try to hide the guns.

Handguns aren’t allowed in London. They were banned in England after 1996, meaning these men don’t obey the law in even the most basic of senses.

This means one of two things to Harry: these men might have an in with the law, so they don’t have to face any repercussions for carrying guns openly, and the fact that none of his sources know these men means that they might be coming from inside. These people might be working for his father, or they might just be a newly-formed group trying to gather some attention. Whatever the case, Harry’s not very happy either way.

“Thank you for coming to get me tonight, Harry,” she murmurs, eyes soft as she looks over at him.

This works to distract him from his thoughts, works to pull him from his mind and focus on her. At the end of the day, this might just be nothing more than a coincidence. These men might just be reckless and lovers of coffee; it’s just that in Harry’s family, coincidences are rarely so innocent as that.

“I’ll do it again if you need me to,” Harry assures her.

No point in pretending like I don’t know you now, he thinks. Might as well own up to the fact that we’re…

He trails off at the thought, unsure of what they really are. Are they friends? Are they something more? They’re at an awkward in-between point where neither of them can really define their relationship, where neither of them are really sure how to. He hopes that they get to the point where they define it soon, but he also knows that there’s a lot he’s holding back from her. There’s a lot that they haven’t talked about, a lot that they would need to before they became a couple.

“It’s okay,” she assures him. “I just, I appreciate the offer. And I’m sorry if it seemed like I was being…”

“You weren’t being stupid, (Y/N),” Harry interjects, shaking his head as he does. “I’d rather you call me and everything turn out to be okay than you not call me and you wind up hurt.”

Or dead, he adds to himself

The smile that she gives him is more than enough to satiate him for the time being. She understands what he’s saying, he knows. She understands that he truly doesn’t mind times like these, that he doesn’t mind coming to her aide every now and again. At least, he hopes that she understands all of this. It seems like a lot to infer from just a smile.

But then Harry is reminded of the fact that they’re soulmates. It might not feel like it sometimes, since he’s been lying to her about the fact that they are, but they’re soulmates. And they understand each other better than anyone else ever could.

He just hopes that an idea so big as that is enough to keep (Y/N) by his side after he comes clean about everything. But that feels like too much to hope for, and Harry has never been a fan of wishing on shooting stars.


	12. Chapter 12

Harry knows that something is wrong when she doesn’t call him the next day. There’s no thank you text the next morning, no indication that she’s okay. And he fears the worst from her, he fears that something’s happened.

There’s a feeling in his gut that he can’t quite shake as he tries to call her and she doesn’t pick up. There’s an unease that settles in his gut, a fear that is settling over him and seeping into everything that he does. In reality, she could just be busy.

She could be working, or she could be in class. Harry doesn’t know what she’s doing and he shouldn’t have to, but after those men saw her the night before he hasn’t felt safe.

And Harry can’t talk to his dad about this. He can’t ask him if there’s some mob tension that he’s been unaware of, something that he should be aware of, because he can’t tell him that he’s been seeing his soulmate behind his back.

A piece of him worries that his dad already knows, though. There are no secrets in the Holland family now that Nikki is gone; there haven’t been any ever since she died. Dominic has regarded them as too dangerous, too heavy to keep. Secrets get you killed—secrets bubble up inside of you until you share them with someone, and you never know if you did the right thing by sharing them. You never know if the person that you told them to is trustworthy or not, you never know if it will all come catching up to you someday. You never know if it will all come back to bite you in the ass.

Harry just never thought he would have to expect that from his own family.

* * *

 

(Y/N) wants nothing more than to call Harry. She wants to tell him that she’s okay, that she’s going to be okay. But she can’t.

When she got back to her apartment building last night, Harry had offered to walk her up to her flat. He’d offered to make sure that she was safe, but at that point (Y/N) had felt as though she’d bothered him too much throughout the night.

She didn’t want to keep him from his work any longer. She hadn’t wanted to keep him away from home or whatever he’d been doing before her anxious thoughts had pulled him towards her, so she had turned down his offer. And now, she regrets it.

She’s sure that the men that were following her were waiting for the perfect moment to attack. She knows that her apartment building isn’t necessarily the safest; there’s no buzzer to let you in and you don’t have to be called up or let in by someone in the building if you don’t live there. There’s the basic lock on her door, sure, but that’s not enough security for these men. It’s not enough to keep someone out of your apartment if they have every intention of going in, and this is something that she has learned the hard way.

As Harry calls and texts her, (Y/N) sits in a car with the men that watched her at the coffee shop. She knows their orders—two medium black coffees—and she knows the names that they gave her. They probably aren’t their real names, but they’re all that (Y/N) has to go off of at this point.

Dominic and Samuel, they’d told her. The descriptions that she’d given Harry had been off, surely; they’d been too generic for how they look now that she can see them both up close. Their faces are harder, more set than she remembers them originally being.

She doesn’t speak any more than she already has. She’s attempted to ask them where they’re taking her, she’s attempted to ask why they didn’t restrain her in any form other than the rope around her wrists. As a hostage, (Y/N) feels as though she has a lot of freedom in this situation; really, she could attempt to jump out of the car that they’ve been driving in for the past twelve hours if it wasn’t going so fast and she trusted herself to be covert about it.

“He’s really calling her,” Samuel says, shaking his head as he does. “He won’t let up.”

“Let him worry,” Dominic replies. “He should be.”

She can only assume that they’re talking about Harry. She has no idea what connection he has to these men, nor does she understand why she’d be of value to them. They’re obviously attached to some underground business from the guns that they carry, obviously not afraid of the law since they’ve broken it so overtly. She doesn’t know what gain they’re gathering from having her here, nor does she understand what type of point they’re trying to prove.

It doesn’t feel like it’s a monetary gain. It doesn’t feel like it’s a sexual one, either, since they haven’t done anything more than bind her wrists and ignore her speech. Anyways, she’s not rich or successful, and unless Harry has more money than he’s initially let on to her, she doesn’t know what they’re going to gain from her.

“Can I just text him?” She tries, knowing that they’re talking about Harry.

They seem genuinely surprised that she’s picked up on the fact that they’re talking about him.

“He’s going to keep calling unless you let me,” she tries again, noting that she at least has their attention as she speaks. They might not give her any in return, but she has it for the moment. “Or, unless one of you says something in response. You can just text him and let him know I’m okay, and then you can do whatever you need to me. He’s not going to let up unless you do.”

“Maybe we want him to worry,” Dominic replies.

This is the first time that either of them have acknowledged anything that she’s said. Her blood runs cold at his voice, her eyes closing on instinct as she tries to block herself from the fact that they’re using her. Not that it really matters why they’ve kidnapped her, necessarily, but she knows now that they’re doing this to get something from Harry.

“What do you want from him?” She asks, though (Y/N) knows that she’s probably not going to get an answer.

But, maybe twelve hours of her incessant questioning is beginning to wear them down. Maybe her brief silence allowed them to think about how to treat her. Whatever the case may be, Dominic looks at her in the rearview mirror as he replies.

“He’s been hiding the fact that you’re his soulmate from us, (Y/N).”

She shudders at the fact that he knows her name, cringing at the idea that he knows who she is even though she wears a nametag at work.

“I’m not his soulmate,” she replies easily. “My soulmate never turned around when we passed by each other, so I don’t…I don’t have one.”

But the sudden understanding washes over her. Harry took an unnatural interest in her from the first moment that they met, he took a sudden interest in her cafe even though he’s lived in London all of his life. And it all happened suspiciously close to the time that her soulmate touched her for the first time.

Harry Holland is her soulmate, but that doesn’t explain why she’s in this car with Dominic and Samuel. It doesn’t answer any more of her questions.

“Then why are you guys taking me?” She asks. “If he is my soulmate, I mean.”

“Because he’s been hiding it from us!” Dominic shouts, suddenly more passionate than he’s been in front of (Y/N).

She flinches, retracting in her seat as best she can as she waits for him to elaborate. But, he doesn’t. The silence that settles over the three of them makes her nervous, it makes her uneasy as she tries to gather where they’ve been driving to for the past twelve hours.

But, she realizes suddenly, maybe they’ve been driving in circles like they’ve been talking. Maybe there really isn’t a faraway destination for them to hide her at. Just like how Harry led her on for all of this time, (Y/N) fears that Dominic and Samuel have been leading her in circles to try and make her think a certain way.


	13. Chapter 13

Harry knows that something is really wrong when Tom comes into his room later that day. He’s been trying to call and text (Y/N) throughout the day, trying to attract her attention as best he can. Maybe she’s just busy. He hopes to God that she’s just busy, but there’s a piece of him that says that she isn’t.

“Have you seen dad and Sam?” Tom asks. “Been gone since last night, wonderin’ where they went off to.”

And that’s when it clicks in Harry’s mind. The two men that (Y/N) had attempted to describe, while a bit off in her description, were his twin brother and his father. His blood runs cold and he feels his heart stop, his eyes widening as he looks at Tom.

Tom doesn’t seem to understand. His head tilts to the side and his brows furrow in confusion as he looks at his younger brother. “What is it? Where did they go?”

“I think….I think that they took (Y/N), Tom,” Harry breathes in a shaky whisper.

Tom laughs, his head shaking in disbelief as he tries to process what Harry is telling him. Tom doesn’t think that Dominic and Sam are capable of something that heinous, of something that cruel; because they’re not. In Tom’s eyes, they are his father and brother.

And maybe Dominic is estranged from the family. Maybe he is distant, unknown. Maybe he hasn’t been the best of fathers these past few years, maybe Dominic has been so overwhelmed by the loss of his wife that he hasn’t been able to think about anything else. Maybe Dominic hasn’t been the best dad, but he’s been a father. And sometimes, Tom rationalizes, that has had to have been enough.

But what Harry says makes sense. It all comes together in this moment, Dominic’s “unaware” nature, how he didn’t seem to know about (Y/N)’s existence. Dominic is many things, but blissfully uninvolved in his sons lives is not one of those things. He surely knew; maybe not at the same time as everyone else, but he knew. And that is something that Tom is realizing.

“How are you so sure?” Tom asks, brown eyes blinking slowly as he tries to read Harry’s own brown gaze.

“Because they…someone’s been watching her, Tom. Two people that she described to me last night and I led them right to her and this is all my fault—”

Tom has to grab Harry’s arm to get him to stop talking. Harry’s eyes are wide and frantic, unsure of everything around him. Tom knows this feeling, this type of desperation. He knows how damaging it can be to watch someone you love be taken from you, he knows how heart wrenching it is to be a piece of this mob. This is not the life that any of them want; this is not the life that any of the Holland boys deserve. But it is the one that they have all been placed with, and Tom will be damned if he doesn’t try to make the best of it.

“It’s not your fault.” Tom’s voice is calm and steady, a direct contrast to Harry’s frantic tone. “It’s no one’s fault besides dad’s and Sam’s. We’ll…We’ll find her, yeah?”

“How?” Harry laughs now, a desperate tone and a melancholy note.

There is no happiness in his eyes, there is no mirth in his heart. This is the lowest he has ever been, the worst he has ever felt. Tom may be sure that this isn’t his fault, that nothing could have prevented this, but Harry is not so sure. If he had just told (Y/N) that she was overdramatic, that she didn’t need him to drive her home last night, then Dominic and Sam never would have been able to connect them.

They would never have known that she and Harry were connected. They would have been able to speculate that it was her, they might have been able to reason it out somehow, but there never would have been a direct correlation. And now there is. And now she’s in trouble. And it’s all his fault, whether or not Tom wants to blame it all on him.

* * *

 

Harry has been calling her for the past fifteen minutes. She hasn’t been able to convince either of the two men to let her answer, to satiate him for a little bit. And he’s draining her phone battery, whether or not he knows it, but she’s exhausted. She hates the ringtone she chose for him—Hey Baby (I Wanna Know if You Would be my Girl)—and she hates the fact that it won’t fucking stop.

“Will one of you just tell him to stop calling me?” She begs. “Or, like, put my phone on airplane mode, or silence it, or…or something? I think we’re all tired of that song playing.”

This is torture. This is the worst punishment anyone could have ever put her through—and that’s saying something, considering everything that (Y/N) has been through. She’s had an awful man in her life before, been used and treated like nothing, and she thought that Harry would be different. She’s dealt with the fact that Harry’s her soulmate, that he’s been lying to her all of this time, and now she has to deal with this annoying fucking song on repeat until Harry stops calling her.

“I swear to God,” she says as he calls again, the snippet of the song beginning again. “I swear to fucking God if you don’t turn that fucking phone off, then I am going to jump out of this moving vehicle. You’ll lose your hostage, I’ll break a leg, and you can keep my fucking phone. Will you for the love of fucking God just turn it off!”

Maybe she’s being a bit mean. Maybe this is not the thing that she should be losing her shit over; she’s being held hostage, and what she chooses to argue with Dominic and Samuel over is the fact that they won’t silence her phone. This is the tipping point, the breaking moment where (Y/N) realizes that she is no longer in control. These men have taken her, they’re forcing her to listen to her stupid ringtone, and she is going to lose her shit if they don’t make some sort of change to what they’re doing.

She starts screaming at the top of her lungs when the song repeats. She sees Dominic’s eyes widen and Sam blink a few times from the rearview mirror, as if both of them forgot that she had the power to scream. She’s not yelling for anything in particular, not really trying to yell for help, she’s just yelling to be a bitch. If they want to annoy her, then she can dish it right back out to them.

“Okay!” Samuel concedes after a minute. “Okay, okay!”

She continues screaming, throat sore and scratchy since she’s exerting so much energy when she hasn’t had a drink of water—or anything, for that matter—in so long. It’s been more than fifteen hours at this point, and she’s thirsty. But, she’ll do anything to get that song to stop.

Samuel fumbles with her phone for a moment before he silences it. He leaves it off airplane mode—probably so that Harry can track down their coordinates when he stops calling her—but it’s silent. The phone only vibrates now when he calls, and she stops screaming; she doesn’t stop until it’s silenced, though.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, relaxing back into her seat. “Was that so hard, now?”

She hears Dominic’s chuckle, soft and breathy as he tries not to let it be heard. Eventually, she realizes, they will have to stop for gas. They can’t keep driving forever; the two men will have to eat at some point. Maybe she’ll be dead by then, maybe she won’t be. As long as her phone is silenced, she really doesn’t care.

The ride is silent for a while longer until she begins to notice that they’re actually driving somewhere. Their endless circles have drawn to a close, and she notices that they’re going somewhere that they haven’t been before. She doesn’t know whether to be excited or devastated with this fact, but she knows that it’s not the worst thing she’s ever encountered. She just listened to Hey Baby on repeat for upwards of twenty minutes; things certainly can’t get any worse than that.

(Y/N) just doesn’t know how wrong she can be.


	14. Chapter 14

(Y/N) is carried out of the car with forceful hands. Samuel takes one side of her and Dominic takes the other, though she probably would have walked wherever they led her without their help. It’s not like she’s a very fast runner, she’s not very athletic or good at things like that. At this point, her best method of survival is to follow their instructions if she wants to live.

And she does; she wants to live long enough to ask Harry why he felt the need to hide the fact that he’s her soulmate, why he wanted to hide that from her and keep her in the dark. She wants to know why he founded their relationship on lies, wants to know what he really does for a living that has him involved with the mob like this. But a part of her knows that she probably doesn’t want to know, that she probably doesn’t need to know what he’s doing. It wouldn’t matter—it won’t matter so long as they’re together and she’s alive.

But with every passing moment, she doesn’t know if that’s possible. She knows that Dominic and Samuel want her alive, but she also knows that it might just be to get Harry to see her and find them. She knows that, really, at the end of the day, she’s just collateral for them. They just need Harry and they need her in order to get him there.

She wonders, as they walk into the empty warehouse—such a cliche, she thinks—about Harry’s family. She thinks back to their date at the restaurant that cost more than her monthly rent, thinks about the names of his brothers. Repeating them to herself like a mantra, she lets the names ring out in every breath she takes.

Tom, Sam, Paddy, she repeats. Tom, Sam, Paddy.

These names are her comfort, her coping mechanism; the repetition is easing her into the idea that she is helpless in this situation. Besides her voice, she has nothing. (Y/N) isn’t strong, she isn’t fast. Sometimes, she’s barely even able to consider the fact that she’s smart.

Tom, Sam… Her thoughts run silent as she realizes what she’s just thought, the name that she’s just said to herself. Sam.

“You’re his family, aren’t you?” She asks as they sit her down in a chair and begin to tie her to it with the rope that had been sitting next to it. All of this is so cliche and heavy and she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe around the realization that this is his family.

They don’t answer. Honestly, (Y/N) never expected them to. This is too much, it’s too much for her to live with and she can’t breathe. His own family have kidnapped her, and she knows that this isn’t some twisted fantasy of his. His own family barely knows that she’s his girlfriend, his own family needs him to come find her to ensure that they’re together. She led them to her, essentially, by asking him to come get her and take her home last night. It’s easy for her to see, now, it’s easy for her to see it now that she’s tied up and unable to go anywhere. It feels so stupid, she feels so stupid.

“He didn’t tell you about me, did he?” She doesn’t know how all of this is coming together, but it’s because of the little pieces.

It’s because Harry lied to her about his own family business. It’s because Harry tried to cover up the fact that he was in the mob. It’s because Harry didn’t tell her that he was her soulmate, that he didn’t give her a chance to understand any of his reasoning. It’s because of all of that and more that (Y/N) realizes Dominic and Samuel—Sam—have taken her to prove a point to Harry. She’s nothing more than a statement to them, and the realization is making her a bit sick.

If she’s just a statement to them, what will they do to her once their point has been received by Harry?

* * *

“They want you to find her.” Tom says this so nonchalantly, so easily that Harry knows it’s true.

The truth always comes out easier than any falsehood ever could, especially an obvious truth like that. It’s easy for Harry to realize why Dominic and Sam would take (Y/N) to begin with, now that he knows the truth. He knows now that Dominic is mad that Harry didn’t come to him before beginning to take an interest in his soulmate. He knows that Dominic wants to be in control, and now that Harry isn’t letting him everything is falling apart.

But if he had let his father know that he’d met his soulmate, that he was trying things out with her, what would have happened? Who was to say that Dominic would have let him? If this is what lengths Dominic will take once he finds out about a secret, what would he have done if (Y/N) was an honest truth in their life?

It doesn’t matter, he realizes. None of that matters anymore; hypotheticals are pointless when they’re living in this reality, a reality that is unmoving to the changes that Harry is attempting to wish upon it.

“So, what do we do?” He asks Tom, his brow furrowed as he does.

Harry can feel that his cheeks are flushed crimson and he can tell that his expression is worried. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to do to save her. And he can tell that Tom doesn’t know, either, from the way that his brow furrows in a way that mimics Harry’s own facial expression. There’s really nothing they can do when Dominic already has her, there’s nothing that they can do when the betrayal is already running its course.

Harry knew to expect this type of betrayal from his father. He just never thought that he’d have to expect it from Sam, too.


	15. Chapter 15

“Is her phone still on?” Tom asks, eyes wide and hopeful as he looks at his brother.

Harry knows that it is. He’s been calling her nonstop for the past few hours, futily attempting to make her answer when he already knows that she won’t. It hasn’t been going immediately to voicemail, it hasn’t been switched off.

“I think so,” he murmurs, going to grab his phone to call her once more to make sure.

“No!” Tom interjects, shaking his head as his eyes go wide. “No, don’t call her again. If you’ve been calling her for the entire day, her phone’s losing battery and we know dad and Sam didn’t think far enough ahead to take a charger with them. It’s all about the moment with them, y’know? So just…just wait, Harry. It’s on.”

Harry nods, knowing that Tom’s right. But he wants to hear her voice, he wants to hear the message that she set up. He wants to hear her voice as if he’s never going to hear it again because he doesn’t know, really, if he ever will hear it again in person. But if he can’t call her right now, he’ll hold off. He’d do anything for her, for her safety. If this is the only thing that he can do for now, it’s what he’ll do.

“Why does it need to be on, though?”

Harry’s so stressed that he can’t think rationally, that he can’t even really be rational in this moment. He’s worried for (Y/N)’s safety, stressed out by the fact that she’s not with him. He doesn’t know what he could have done to prevent this, what steps he could have taken to prevent this. It makes him upset, it’s been tearing him apart ever since she stopped replying to his texts and calls.

“We can track her GPS that way. Are you even a child of a mob boss, Harry?” Tom’s teasing him, even though this really isn’t the time or place to do so.

It’s poorly timed, but Harry appreciates it. He knows that Tom is just trying to ease the tension that’s settled beneath his bones, the unease that’s sitting between them. He knows that Tom understands how stressful this is, not necessarily for the fact that Dominic has betrayed him but because Sam took part in it, too.

He knows that Sam took their mother’s death hard. They all did in their own ways, really, but Sam seemed to struggle with it in the most outward way of anyone. He doesn’t mean this as an excuse for Sam’s behavior, as he knows that there is no excuse for the crimes that Sam has committed, but he means this as a potential reason. Grief affects people in strange ways and leads them to do things, to say things even, that they really didn’t mean in the first place.

Maybe he’ll be able to work past this with Sam. Maybe he’ll be able to put this behind them, maybe he’ll be able to move on from the fact that Sam helped their father kidnap his soulmate; right now, Harry just needs to find (Y/N) and make sure that she’s safe. That’s the only thing that he can focus on, the only thing that he knows he can accomplish.

“So, how do we track her GPS coordinates?” Harry asks, eyes wide and hopeful that Tom will know what to do.

Sure, Harry is good with technology; that doesn’t mean that he knows what to do in this situation. He’s never been in a situation—mob related or not—where he’s been asked to track someone’s GPS coordinates through their phone. He assumes that most people within the mob, no matter how they’re related to the mob, would be smart enough to take precautions against that possibility.

This has helped him to realize that he should take those precautions; he’ll figure out how to when (Y/N) is safe.

Tom is already scrolling through his phone, no doubt already taking the steps to make sure that he can track (Y/N). Being the oldest, he’s had to learn how to be a proper mob boss as he’ll most likely be taking over when Dominic steps down—if Dominic ever steps down. He knows that this is the life he has to lead, whether or not he likes it. It’s in the same sense that Harry knows he’ll always have to be a part of the mob.

This is a lifestyle that takes lives, a lifestyle that claims them. This is a lifestyle that holds onto people and refuses to let them go, whether or not they chose to be a part of it. Harry never chose this. He didn’t ask to be born into this family, he didn’t ask to be placed in the mob.

If he had a different life, he imagines that he would be a photographer. He’s always loved messing with different apps on his phone to filter and change the photos that he takes. It’s something that he does to relieve stress, something that he does to pass the time when he finds himself with a bunch of it free.

But, he doesn’t have a different life. He only has this one: the one in which his oldest brother is attempting to track down his soulmate, the one in which his father and twin brother have taken her on some instinct that he doesn’t understand. This is the life that Harry Holland was given, and it’s all that he can do to make sure that he uses it to his advantage.

* * *

 

(Y/N) hopes that Harry has been trying to find her, because her wrists are burning from the rope. She realized too late that she was supposed to tense up when they tied the rope around her, since that would make her take up more space than she usually does. When she would untense, the ropes would fall loose and she might be able to wiggle free.

Maybe that wouldn’t even work, she thinks with a soft breath leaving her. She read it online, and she knows that she’s not supposed to trust everything that she reads on the internet. Still, anything is worth a try at this point.

But even if she had been able to get out of the ropes, what would she have done? Would she have been able to punch Samuel or Dominic? Would she have been able to get out of this situation? And in the unlikely situation that she would have been able to beat up Dominic and Samuel, would she have been able to get out of the building that they’re holding her in? Would she have been able to get out and to safety?

She doesn’t have her phone, so she’d have to find someone to call the police for her. That’s even more unlikely than her being able to get out of the ropes and beat Dominic and Samuel to the punch—quite literally. This place is in the middle of nowhere and she’s not a very fast runner.

If she survives this, (Y/N) promises herself that she’ll take up some form of fitness. Maybe not jogging at first, as she knows that she’s never been much of a runner, but she’ll get there.

“Has he figured out where we are?” She asks, though she knows that she’s probably not going to get an answer. “I mean, if that’s your goal, turn on my location from Google Maps and share it with Tom or Harry. You can share it for a few hours and they should get a notification.”

She’s not even suggesting this for her rescue. She’s just hungry and tired and thirsty—in that order—and she knows that Harry coming to this location will ensure that she’s either killed or freed. Either way, it will solve her three primary problems. It would also ensure that she’s freed from her binds—whether that be in a physical sense or not—because the rope is really beginning to become uncomfortable against her wrists. And her nose itches, but that’s barely even registered in her mind at this point. There are far bigger things to think about; and if she thinks about the itch on her nose any more than she already has, then it will become unbearable and probably drive her insane in the same way that her annoying ringtone had.

Her thought is met with only silence and she lets her head roll back onto her shoulders.

“You guys are really bad at conversation,” she grumbles, (e/c) eyes fixated on the ceiling. “I’m just trying to give you ideas to get to your goal. At the end of the day, we’re kind of on the same team.”

Maybe this is what Stockholm Syndrome is, she thinks. Maybe this is how it feels to become sympathetic with your captors; you feel as if you’re on the same team.

Or maybe she’s just tired of being held captive. Maybe she just wants to be released, to be able to see Harry and eat something. God, she’d even eat the day-old donuts that they change out at the cafe that she usually tries to stay away from, even though she’s allowed to take some home at the end of her shift if she’d like to.

“I know, I know, crazy idea,” she insists upon talking again, knowing that they won’t reply to her. “Us being on the same team and all. ‘m just saying that, you know, if I don’t show up for my next shift at the cafe that Miranda will probably call the cops or something. I know that you guys transcend the law and so that’s not a threat, but a girl can hope, right?”

She watches Dominic’s face pale at those words and for a moment she feels victorious. She’s not exactly sure if his face is losing color because he’s mad or frustrated at the fact that she won’t shut up, or if it’s because the thought of the police getting involved never crossed his mind.

Either way, the mere fact that she’s elicited such a response from a mafia boss makes her laugh. Her head falls back against her shoulders and she laughs more than she reasons she ever has before; the lack of sleep and her anxiety have melded together to create a perfect concoction of humor that bubbles up from her mouth and leaves her in a sudden moment of clarity.

“You guys are horrible kidnappers. You might want to work on that in the future.”


	16. Chapter 16

Tom figures out how to track (Y/N)’s coordinates after a few frantic moments. Now, they’re on their way to some abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It feels so cliche that Harry almost wants to scream, that he almost wants to yell about it. It’s so obvious, he realizes, that it’s stupid. It’s idiotic.

Of course his father is incapable of having an original thought. Of course he is incapable of having an original idea; this type of move is the thing of movies. It is the thing of every kidnapping movie, it is the thing of every movie that centers around the damsel in distress. She falls into a trap and finds herself in a vulnerable position, much like (Y/N) is right now.

But Harry knows that she is not a damsel in distress. She did not happen into this moment, she did not fall into a trap. (Y/N) is not that weak. She is not that vulnerable, nor is she that stupid. Above all else, she is smart. She is cunning. She is successful, she knows how to keep herself safe. If there is something that Harry never thought (Y/N) would need, it would be rescue.

And sure, she get anxious sometimes. She’s needed him to take her home at night, and maybe that’s what got them into this position. Maybe that’s what brought them into a position where he had to find her GPS coordinates and he’s now driving to an abandoned warehouse with his eldest brother. But (Y/N) is not in this position because of her anxiety; she did not wind up here because she’s anxious. It is because of his family that she’s here. It’s because her soulmate’s family is stupid, because Harry’s family doesn’t know how to handle emotion that she is in this position.

And it’s not Harry’s fault, either. He doesn’t know that now, he can’t recognize that within himself. But someday, he will. The hope is that he has (Y/N) by his side at that point to help him work through this emotional trauma. They’ll have a lot to unpack together, but that’s something that could bring them together. That’s something that could bring them even closer together than they might already be bound together after this shared trauma. That is, if she’ll have him after all of this.

“Are we almost there?” Harry asks Tom, his gaze hopeful as he looks to his older brother.

He needs the answer to be an affirmative. He needs them to be closer to (Y/N) than they were five minutes ago, even though the drive is about thirty minutes out from their home. He knows that every moment spent driving is another moment that (Y/N) is unsure of where she is or what’s happening.

“Five minutes closer than we were before.” Tom sounds a bit frustrated, he sounds as if he’s at the end of his line.

And Harry really can’t blame him. He knows that Tom didn’t sign up for this, that Tom didn’t ask to be dragged into his drama. Tom already lost his soulmate, he already let her walk away. For him to want (Y/N) to be a permanent fixture in the life of their family to the point that he’ll drive to an abandoned warehouse on a weeknight, that he’d do that for Harry speaks volumes. It’s more than Sam is doing for him and Harry reasons that this is more than Sam will ever be able to do for him.

Nothing will make things better between Harry and Sam. There is nothing to be said anymore, or at least in this moment. All that Harry can think about is getting to (Y/N) and getting her to safety. There is no future past that, no moment that could make things better in the present. There is no hope for a better future within his family, at least not right now. Right now, all Harry can focus on is getting to (Y/N). All that he can focus on is making sure that she’s safe.

* * *

 

(Y/N) hears them before she sees them. At first, she allows herself to entertain the idea that rescue has come. She entertains the notion that she’s going to get out of this alive, that she’ll be able to go back to her university in a few days. Maybe not this week; maybe she’ll get some type of emotional clearance from a higher up where she can have a break for a few days. But, she could go back to work and school in the next few days. She could go back to a relatively normal life.

Then, she realizes that Harry has become a part of her normal life. She doesn’t know if she could handle that, if she could handle being close to him once more. She just wants to know that he’s okay, really, but she doesn’t know about their future as soulmates. She doesn’t know what’s in store for them in that department.

But, she knows that she’s probably not being rescued. More people might be coming to rough her up, to make sure that Harry learns his lesson. At this point, it really isn’t about her and she knows that. She knows that she’s not the most important person in this operation. (Y/N) isn’t the one that has a lesson to learn; it’s Harry.

Then, she hears pounding at the door. Or, it’s her stomach growling. It’s been more than thirteen hours since she last had something to eat and she’s verging on starving. Whoever’s knocking at the door, she hopes that they brought her something to eat.

“I ordered a PostMate,” she chirps, voice weak from a mixture of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. “Or was it Ubereats? Hard to remember at this point, sorry.”

The look that Sam cuts her is nothing short of scathing. It elicits a cheeky sneer from her—if such a thing even exists—as she watches Dominic approach the door.

“What?” (Y/N) calls out. “Not in the mood for some Nandos?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Sam calls out. “God, you’re so fucking annoying, aren’t you? Can’t you just shut up for thirty seconds?”

“Can’t you just be decent to me for thirty seconds?” (Y/N) retaliates without missing a beat. “I’ve damn near spent the entire day with you both, I just…I think I deserve some human decency, Sam. You could at least give me a chuckle; you should be hungry, too. You should appreciate that I’m thinking about everyone, trying to think things through. You guys obviously didn’t, did you?”

Really, she’s not sure where this sudden burst of confidence comes from. She doesn’t know what she’s tapped into that brought her to this moment, that has allowed her to be so confident and easy around the two men. Maybe it’s her exhaustion. Maybe it’s just the fact that she’s been worn down after these last hours with them. It’s the survival instinct kicking in, she’s sure, if it hadn’t already kicked in before.

Sam goes to reply before the knocking persits. Dominic is scoffing, shaking his head as if he didn’t expect this to happen. As if they didn’t want this to happen. (Y/N) isn’t stupid. Sure, she’s anxious, but they’ve been giving her a lot of time to think things through.

She hasn’t spent all of her time panicking; eventually, she resigned herself to the situation. She understood that there was nothing she could do to change what she was going through. This is what she’s doing right now, this is what she’s going through. There’s no amount of whining that could change things, there’s no amount of pouting and kicking her feet that could change what she’s going through.

The warehouse door opens. It’s the side door, not even one of the bigger doors that usually opens in the movies. There’s no dramatic reveal, just a moment before the door is open and the moment after the door is opened. There is only the before and after. There is the before where (Y/N) fears that she might be roughed up even more than she already is—which is to say not at all. Then, there is the after.

There is the after where Harry and Tom stand in the side entrance to the warehouse that she’s been tied up in with their brother and father. This is the current moment. This is her current situation.


	17. Chapter 17

Harry’s eyes are searching her figure for any signs of damage. In another scenario, in a different scene where they weren’t meeting after she’s been kidnapped for the better part of the past day or so, it would be as if he were checking her out. It would appear as if he were across the bar, watching her dance with some friends as he nursed a whiskey. It would be a better scene, a happier one. But that is not their universe, and the fact that Harry has come to terms with is that he is not going to be able to change the past; all that he is capable of is moving forward in the shared time that he has with her.

He doesn’t see any signs of damage. He can’t find any visible signs of damage on her, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t internal ones. He’s sure that she’s going through a lot right now, that she’s pieced together things that he always wanted to tell her. After this, Harry reasons that she probably won’t want anything to do with him. And he can’t blame her; not really.

If he were in her position, he wouldn’t trust himself after everything that she’s gone through. If he were a normal soulmate, someone who really worked at his family’s law firm, his father and twin brother would not have kidnapped her. If he were a normal person, they would never have been placed into this situation. And if he had just communicated with her from the beginning, told (Y/N) that his family is a part of the London mob and that his father does not believe in the idea that love can build someone up after a tragedy, they might be in a different position right now. She’s one of the most understanding people that he knows, one of the most genuine and loving people that he has ever had the pleasure of knowing, and with hindsight that’s 20/20, he’s realized that she would have found a way to work through that issue with him.

“What do you want?” He asks finally, a moment’s silence having taken over everyone in the room.

Dominic and Sam are looking at him as if he’s grown another head. Surely, though, this is what they wanted all along; surely this was the end-goal that they wanted to achieve. They wanted to prove a point to him—that’s why (Y/N) is only tied to the chair and not visibly hurting in any other way. This is all some type of sick statement to them, one that involves taking an innocent piece of this large puzzle and marring her until she’s just as corrupt as the rest of them.

“What does love make you, Harry?” Dominic asks in return, not answering the question at all.

It drives Harry crazy to be related to this man. It makes him sick to know that he’s Dominic’s flesh and blood, but not nearly as sick as it makes him to know that he’s Sam’s twin brother.

When Harry doesn’t reply, too sick to his stomach to even formulate a proper response, Sam pulls out his gun that (Y/N) had mentioned him carrying. He pushes it to her temple, and Harry is surprised to see that she doesn’t even flinch. He wonders briefly if she’s done this before, if the universe has put them together for reasons unknown to either of them. Maybe he’s not the only one with secrets.

Or, perhaps she’s too fatigued to care. He knows that her anxiety probably hasn’t let her sleep, and that fact mixed with the idea that the chair she’s sitting in is made of wood and probably rather uncomfortable definitely doesn’t make for a restful slumber.

“You might want to answer him, Harry,” Sam hums, for all the world sounding as if they’re discussing what they’re going to have for dinner that night as he clicks off the safety of his gun.

And maybe in another world, they are discussing what they’re having for dinner. Maybe in another timeline, (Y/N) is his girlfriend and his family coped with their grief as best they could. Maybe instead of Sam’s gun, it’s Harry’s lips that press into the skin of her temple. But that is not their lifetime and it is nothing more than a hypothetical at this point when this is their present.

When the safety of Sam’s gun clicks off, (Y/N) flinches. Harry watches as she releases a slow breath, knowing that she’s probably going through a massive panic attack at this moment. And he can’t blame her, really; he imagines that anyone in her position would be experiencing a similar moment. Anyone faced with death would probably feel uneasy or restless.

“Okay, okay,” Tom says, stepping forward with his hands raised in surrender. “How about we all just take a breather, yeah?”

Dominic scoffs and Sam presses the gun into (Y/N)’s temple so hard that Harry fears it’s going to bruise. He watches as she flinches once more, drawing in a shaky breath as she tries to steady herself. He knows that the only thing to make her feel better would be to have the gun lowered from her temple, and he knows that telling the person who has put the gun against her temple to “take a breather” isn’t the way to accomplish that at all.

But he knows that Tom means well. He knows that Tom just wants what’s best for everyone involved, but that he sometimes goes about it in a backwards or wrong way. Either way, it doesn’t matter. All that he can do is move forward, breaths stuttering in his own chest as he tries to think of what to say and do to remedy the situation at hand.

“Love makes you weak,” Harry replies, voice nothing more than a meek whisper as he tries to think of what to do in the time that he hopes he’s bought.

Still, Sam doesn’t take the gun away from her temple. He keeps it pressed there, keeps it flush against her skin so that Harry can watch as her breaths come in uneven pants and her eyes slip closed so that she doesn’t have to watch whatever is about to happen. Or, maybe she just can’t process his words; maybe she thinks that he really means them and that they aren’t just a method of distraction to get her to safety.

“Louder,” Dominic requests, though his tone doesn’t grow louder than a grumble that resonates deep and low in his chest.

“It makes you weak!” Harry replies once more, hands balled into fists next to his figure. “Love makes you weak, and that’s why I was never supposed to go after her in the first place.”

His breaths are coming in rapid succession, his chest rising and falling quickly in a way that he knows is evident. He should try to calm down, but with the gun pressed to (Y/N)’s temple and the situation before him, he can’t help but feel a panic attack coming on. He can’t even imagine how she feels in this moment.

“He’s going to cry, isn’t he?” Sam taunts, a low chuckle leaving him as he watches his twin brother struggle to catch his breath.

Harry can feel the shift in the room, the way that the energy twists. He knows that (Y/N)’s eyes are open now, that in this moment he is supposed to be her strength and rock. But, it’s all that he can do to try and stop his oncoming panic attack.

The room feels too big and too small all at once. He feels too warm and too cold, too desperate and needy while still needing space. He wants to fall down into a ball and not come out until he can breathe properly again, until he can live with all of these eyes on him.

“Follow my breathing,” he hears her voice before he registers that her lips have moved.

(Y/N) is taking deep, steady breaths to try and calm Harry down. With a gun pressed to her temple and death staring her in the face, all that she can think to do is make him feel better despite how he’s the reason she’s in this situation to begin with. Maybe it’s her own coping mechanism, he rationalizes. Maybe this is her way of ignoring what feels to be the inevitable.

Harry follows her breathing as best he can, drawing in heavy breaths and letting them go shakily. He looks to her with the understanding that her final moments might be for him, that they might be designed to keep him calm and rational.

When he finally feels as if he’s getting enough air into his lungs, he looks away from her (e/c) eyes to study everyone in the room. He knows that this changes things, that they now see (Y/N) as he does; someone who gives and gives with no expectation that anyone will ever take. He doesn’t know if the change is enough to save her, but he hopes with everything in him that it is.

* * *

(Y/N) doesn’t know what came over her in that moment. She’s not entirely sure as to why she decided to guide Harry’s breathing when he’s the main reason that she’s in this position. If he hadn’t wanted to keep her a secret to protect her, she wouldn’t have needed protection to begin with.

She watches as the air shifts around them. She can feel it as it does even as she shifts into the gun that Sam is pressing into her temple. If death is staring her in the face and these are her last moments, she might as well make the most of it.

She watches as Tom shifts from foot to foot. She watches as Harry’s breathing evens out. She can feel as Sam takes the gun back from her temple to make up for the fact that she’s leaning closer to it, and that’s when it hits her.

She’s not going to die.

“Take the gun away,” she says, voice clear and calm despite the panic welling inside of her. If this plan goes awry, she won’t live to know the difference.

She can read the surprise on Harry’s face, the disbelief in Tom’s.

“I said,” she repeats slowly. “Take the gun away. Or, shoot me. One or the other.”

Dominic’s cough behind her makes her realize that everything she’s doing is right.

“Go on,” she urges.  _“Shoot me.”_


	18. Chapter 18

Harry knows that (Y/N) knows what she’s doing, even if he doesn’t quite follow her process. He knows this because of the way that Dominic is shifting, the way that Sam’s breathing picked up and shifted until it seems as if he’s having a panic attack. There’s something that he can’t see, but it’s something that (Y/N) can.

He shares a glance with Tom, knowing that his older brother has more experience with situations like these. Tom has been around this type of lifestyle longer, he’s seen its ins and outs more intimately than Harry ever plans to or wishes to. Still, Tom seems baffled by (Y/N)’s sudden confidence.

It doesn’t have to make sense, he knows. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t panicking for his soulmate, though. Even though she’s relaxed, even though she’s looking between Tom and himself as if she’s trying to tell them that everything will be okay, Harry doesn’t believe that it will be. Just as soon as their story has started, it feels as if it’s ending.

“Let’s stop wasting time, yeah?” (Y/N) says, sighing out her statement in a casual manner as Sam retracts the gun from her temple. “There’s no bullets in the gun. You guys are making a point to Harry and me and I think it’s been made; how about we just…don’t make it any clearer.

“You guys are in the mob. I know that now, I know that Harry kept me a secret and I’m glad he did; if this is how you lot react to me being a secret, I can’t imagine how I would have been treated if our relationship was public knowledge.”

Harry’s surprised to hear her talk so calmly despite the tears he sees rising to her eyes. And that’s when it hits him—she doesn’t really know if this plan is going to work. She has a strong suspicion—Harry knows that she wouldn’t act on it if she wasn’t almost entirely positive that there weren’t any bullets in the gun—but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t the possibility that this plan won’t blow up in her face.

Harry looks to his father, seeing his face pale and watching as his breathing turns erratic. Dominic is panicking, and that’s how he knows that (Y/N) was right in doing this.

Dominic is always composed. He is always calm and rational despite how irrational some of his work and emotions can be. He always believes that he has the upper hand, so he’s always relaxed and easy. But he isn’t now; he’s panicking. And that’s how Harry knows that Dominic no longer has the upper hand—(Y/N) does.

“She’s smarter than you thought, isn’t she?” Harry murmurs, looking between Sam and Dominic.

Maybe this wasn’t the right thing to say; maybe this will only heighten the situation. Maybe this will be (Y/N)’s last moment, maybe there were bullets in the gun that Harry hadn’t anticipated. Whatever the case may be, he worries that the moves that they’ve been making weren’t the right ones.

That is, until Dominic motions for Sam to take the gun away from (Y/N)’s temple and starts to undo the ropes binding her to the chair. Her breathing evens out and Harry watches in wonder as Dominic gives in. There was no other possibility—there was no way for him to regain the upper hand, so he’s giving it to them.

“Get her out of here,” Dominic grunts.

Harry doesn’t know what this means for them. He doesn’t know if it means that he’s allowed to be open with her, if it means that he’s allowed to be public with his affection for her. He’s not sure what Dominic is expecting from them, what he wants from them; whatever the case may be, Harry is quick to help her out of the chair so that she doesn’t topple over.

She hasn’t had anything to eat or drink the entire time. The least he can do is make sure that she has something in her system before he takes her back home, whether or not she really wants him to after all of this.

* * *

 (Y/N) is leaning into Harry for support as Tom drives them somewhere. She’s not sure where they’re going, nor does she really care. She’s exhausted, worn out as she relaxes into Harry’s hold.

Despite everything, she’s not too mad at him. Maybe she will be when she gets some food in her system, but for now all that (Y/N) can focus on is getting to a safe location where she can try to feel better than she does right now.

“I’m hungry,” she murmurs as Harry goes to ask her something.

She knows that he was going to ask if she’s okay, if she’s holding up alright as she sits next to him. And that’s a stupid question, really, considering the fact that his twin brother and father just kidnapped her for being his soulmate when she didn’t even know that they were soulmates to begin with.

“Can we stop and get something?” Harry asks Tom as he drives them.

“We don’t have to,” she assures the two men before Tom can say anything in response, shaking her head as she looks up at Harry. “We can just go wherever we’re heading and go from there. I’ve lasted this long without food, what will a little bit more do to me?”

“She really is your soulmate, mate,” Tom laughs out, shaking his head as he drives. “That’s some shit you’d say.”

And it’s that statement mingled with the fact that they’re pulling up to an exit on the highway where a McDonalds is promised to be that has (Y/N) remembering just all that’s happened between them. And maybe that’s all over, but she doesn’t have the feeling that all of their problems are over. Maybe they can be together now, but maybe they weren’t meant to be; maybe this was all a sign that they were never meant to be together, whether or not they fall in love or not.

Maybe they weren’t really meant to be together at all.


	19. Chapter 19

“We’re staying here?” (Y/N)’s voice is nothing more than a small murmur, her eyes wide as she studies the safe-house that Tom has taken them to.

For a moment, Harry worries that this place isn’t enough; he worries that she wants more than what he’s able to give her in the moment. Harry worries that what they’ve done isn’t good enough for her, but then he remembers the girl that he’s with.

She isn’t used to things like this. She isn’t used to having a house that isn’t the one that you usually live in. She isn’t used to having a “vacation house” in the country that isn’t a shack or a run-down building. This is something new to her, something different that she’s never experienced before.

“What about my job? My classes? I’ve already missed work today, I can’t…”

Harry goes to cut her off, to end her rambling in a gentle way, but Tom beats him to it.

“You were just bloody kidnapped, (Y/N). They know you’ve been missing—we alerted all of your professors, your employer. There’s been a search-party in your absence, y’know. I think everyone understands that you need a few days to get back to who you were before.”

Harry would think that Tom’s words were kind if he didn’t see the exasperated look that had crossed over his features. He knows that Tom doesn’t have to do any of this for her, he knows that his brother is already going above and beyond.

This is the life that Tom lost when he let his soulmate go. These are the moments that he will never get to have with her; even though he probably wouldn’t want to collect these types of moments. No one wants to see their soulmate in this much pain, in this much distress.

But Harry reasons that having (Y/N) be like this—so distressed, so anxious—is better than not having her at all. It’s better to know that she’s okay, that she knows about him in some sense, than to not know her at all.

“Sorry,” she breathes out, voice so soft and tender that Harry wonders how it has the weight to support itself.

He knows that she’s worrying about the normal things in her life to keep herself from falling apart. He wonders briefly how she’s managed to keep herself together for this long, how she’s managed to support herself for the ride out to their house in the country. And then he wonders, too, how she managed to stay awake after their McDonalds pitstop. Surely she shouldn’t be able to stay awake; surely she’s exhausted at this point.

Maybe, he thinks, she just doesn’t trust him enough to allow herself to fall asleep.

“This place was our mum’s,” Tom explains. “She left it to me in her will and I…I always thought I’d bring my soulmate here. I let her go, though, and now…now I just want to make sure that at least one of my brother’s gets to keep his.

“And it’s not our choice if you want to be with Harry or not. I know that I’d be more than shaken up if I was in your position, (Y/N), and the fact that you’re still so calm and composed is, well, fucking admirable. You don’t have to be this put-together, but I get that you don’t want to fall apart in front of us. And that’s admirable, too.

“Whatever you decide, though—whether or not you want to be with Harry after all of this—should wait a few days. Right now, stay low with him so dad has time to calm down. ‘s my best advice for ya, darlin’.”

Tom catches Harry’s eye in the rearview mirror and gives him a curt nod. Harry knows that Tom isn’t going to stay with them, that he’s going to go back somewhere else to lay low for a little bit. This is Harry’s time to be with his soulmate and Tom won’t interfere with that any more than he has to.

Harry doesn’t get the chance to help (Y/N) out of the car before she’s already stepping out of it. She’s walking slowly, obviously unsteady on her limbs that haven’t been used for so long. And Harry wants to help her, he does; but he’s fearful that he’ll be overstepping, pushing past a boundary that she wasn’t quite ready for him to cross.

He follows her out of the car, bidding a soft “thank you” as a means of goodbye to Tom. He appreciates everything that his older brother has done for him and a part of him wishes that Tom could be his twin instead of Sam; but the universe isn’t quite as kind as he hoped that she would be, she isn’t quite as kind as he needed her to be.

Tom waits until they get into the safety of the house before he drives away. Harry hears the quiet crunch of Tom’s tires against the gravel road that leads to the old cabin that their mum owned. It was the only secret that she ever managed to keep from her husband.

She would take her sons there when things got bad. When Dominic became angry over the most miniscule of details, when things in the mob became too much for her to cope with and she wondered how she ever managed to bring four boys into a lifestyle so brutal, she would threaten her husband by leaving for weeks without telling him before.

And maybe that was cruel of her. But what felt worse to everyone involved was that Dominic never seemed to care enough to follow after them, to look for them. They were his family, sure, but even back then it was still hard to fathom if he really loved them like he should have—like he was supposed to.

Harry watches as (Y/N) pushes open the door to the cottage, watches as she takes in the sheer size of it. Sure, Nikki had hidden this purchase from Dominic; but that didn’t mean she hadn’t used his money to buy it.

The living room is set up so that it blends into the kitchen and dining room with an open floor plan. There’s a half-wall that separates the kitchen from the living room, but other than that there’s no privacy. Harry knows that Tom often comes up here when his own life gets too hectic, so he trusts that there’s food stocked in the fridge and he trusts that the pantry doesn’t contain anything that has already expired.

“And your dad doesn’t know about this?” (Y/N) asks, her eyes landing on Harry for what feels like the first time.

And in a way, this is the first time that she’s seeing him. This is the first time that (Y/N) is seeing him for who he truly is—her soulmate, a pawn in the London mob, a liar. He is nothing like the man she made him out to be and he knows that he doesn’t deserve to be in the same room as her right now, let alone the same building. Still, he feels honored that she’s given him so much as a glance. Harry feels honored that she’s even looking at him right now; it’s more than he feels that he truly deserves in this moment.

“He doesn’t,” Harry assures her, his eyes wide and honest as he looks at her.

He knows that it’s hard to believe. His father is the leader of the London mob and it’s beyond difficult to believe that he could have been blind to this place for all of these years, especially when his wife bought it with his money.

Having that much money is both a blessing and a curse, Harry knows. There’s so much that it’s hard to keep track of, especially when two people are spending it for various reasons that are rarely discussed.

Still, she seems to buy it. And for Harry in this moment, that’s more than enough.

* * *

 

(Y/N) doesn’t know how to feel around Harry right now.

Sure, he seems apologetic and he seems like the good guy; he seems like he really just wants her to get well and feel like herself again, but she knows that he doesn’t realize that the part of her that was truly alive left a long time ago. She’s no longer herself.

She doesn’t imagine that anyone could really be themselves after a trauma like this. No one could be themselves or the person that they had been before they were kidnapped. She wants desperately to return to her normal life, to find some semblance of herself in the world that she left; but she knows that the world she wants isn’t the world she’s going to get.

There’s darker connotations to everything and everyone she used to know. She doesn’t feel like she’ll be able to serve customers that are strong men anymore without having an anxiety attack. She doesn’t feel like she’ll be able to walk to her university classes without fearing for her own safety. Even if Harry and Tom have been promising her that she won’t be hurt by the mob anymore, she doesn’t believe it.

She’s a piece of their world now. She’s a pawn that they can play with, someone that they can abuse and come back to. She knows what their family does, she knows what type of life they all lead, and she’s expected to go on like it never happened.

In the quiet of her bedroom that night, she allows herself to fall apart for the first time in this ordeal. She allows herself to cry, but she doesn’t want any sound to come out of her mouth; she doesn’t want Harry to hear her.

While this all could have been prevented, all they can do now is move forward. There’s nothing left to do besides keep going, keep fighting for whatever they want together. And despite all of this trauma, she does really care for him in a way that she knows she shouldn’t.

She shouldn’t care for him in this way, in a way that reaches into her bones and holds her until she can’t imagine a future that doesn’t involve. She shouldn’t want him to come into her room and hold her until she stops shaking. She should be strong—she just saw through Dominic’s entire plan, after all; she should be able to pull herself together and find herself without the help of anyone else, let alone the person who put her in this position to begin with.

(Y/N) hears him knock on her bedroom door, pushing open the door when she doesn’t answer. They’re far past the point of modesty, far past the point of caring what state the other is in when they knock. At this point, a knock is more of a warning than a request. These are the things that have changed between them—there is no more privacy between two people when you’ve seen someone at their lowest, when you’ve seen someone panic in the face of danger and helped them breathe through it; there is no more privacy when you break down in the aftermath of a kidnapping.

“Oh, darling,” he breathes out, a sound that she registers somewhere far back in her mind.

She knows that he’s coming towards her, that he’s wrapping her up in his embrace that’s loose enough for her to break out of in case it reminds her too much of the binds that she was wrapped in. And she knows that she has time to ask him to leave, she knows that there are moments before he pulls her into his embrace that she can tell him not to touch her. She knows that he would understand.

But in this moment of vulnerability where (Y/N) is crying in the way that she hasn’t allowed herself to all night, she just wants him to hold her. In this tender instance where she has learned that nothing is as it once appeared to be, all she wants is for him to tell her that it’s going to be okay.

He holds her until she stops shaking, soothing her like one might a scared horse. Maybe this isn’t the way to treat your soulmate, as (Y/N) is no animal; but she knows that he hasn’t been given many chances to be vulnerable in this sense. She knows that he’s just going with what he knows.

“Do you…Do you want to talk about it?” Harry offers, eyes so warm and brown that she can’t help but smile at how ridiculous his question is.

He means well, she knows, but she also knows that he doesn’t understand how to handle her. The question is so ridiculous, standing out against the gravity of the situation that she’s just been through that she can’t help but laugh.

She presses her forehead against his shoulder and laughs into the fabric of his shirt, her fists clenching it tightly as she tries to catch her breath. She knows that she’s going through a wide range of emotions right now, but she imagines that it’s all to be expected.

“Sorry,” (Y/N) gasps out once she can finally take enough air in to talk with. “I just…don’t think this is the appropriate moment for a therapy session, I guess.”

Harry lets out a chuckle, though the smile he gives to match it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. He seems apologetic, and while (Y/N)’s first instinct is to tell him that none of this is his fault, she knows that most of it is his fault. Some of this could have been prevented with honesty and communication, but most relationships have a shaky foundation of those things, anyways.

She knows that all they can really do is move forward. She just hopes that they’ll be able to move forward together.


	20. Chapter 20

After Harry soothed (Y/N) and calmed her down from her panic attack, he put her to bed and allowed her to sleep for the first time since she’d been kidnapped. He isn’t sure what to do next; he isn’t sure what comes next for them. He finds himself worrying that their story has ended before it ever really began, as stupid and juvenile as that sounds.

He wants to be a part of her life permanently. She’s already a part of his world, and if any rival mobs find out that one of the heirs to the underground London throne has found his soulmate, he knows that the both of them are in trouble. She’s no longer just (Y/N)—now, she’s Harry Holland’s soulmate.

In another lifetime, he’d be upset because of how blatantly sexist that is. Her worth is not defined by him, it does not reside in him. Her worth stretches farther than he ever could and he hopes with everything inside of him that she knows that.

She’s the strongest person he knows right now. Not everyone would have have handled her kidnapping in the way that she did, with an ease and caution that so many people would have lacked under those circumstances. A lot of people would have caved, given into the pressures put on them by the leader of the London mob. But (Y/N) didn’t, and Harry knows that this is just one of the reasons that the universe put them together.

While he’s getting ready for bed, ready to put this day to rest in the security of a home known only to his mother and brothers, he gets a call from Tom. He answers it quickly, not wanting the abrasive ringing to wake (Y/N) up when she’s obviously beyond exhausted.

“Hey, mate,” Tom’s voice comes through the phone, clear and heavy with a weight that Harry finds himself unable to describe.

His first thought pushes him towards the idea that something is wrong. That after all this time, after all this strife and drama centered around his relationship with (Y/N), there’s something more for them to experience together.

“Dad seems pretty calm. I told him you and (Y/N) are lying low, but you’re going to want to talk to him sooner rather than later. He doesn’t seem mad, he just seems…vacant, if that makes sense.”

“I can’t call him on this phone,” Harry protests. “He’ll be able to track the number, won’t he?”

Tom sighs and Harry can imagine him shaking his head on the other end of the line. “I don’t think he’s in that mood anymore, Harry.”

Harry is struck by the realization that all of this drama can be simplified under the understanding of Dominic’s moods. All this was, in a sense, was a bad spell, a bad mood. The thought makes him want to laugh—that language feels too flimsy for what he and (Y/N) have gone through. Especially after what she’s gone through; there’s not enough weight to Tom’s language, not enough density to prove that what she’s gone through has been a valid experience.

“I’ll trust you,” Harry replies, and he means it.

After everything that Tom has done for him over the past few days, Harry knows that he can trust his brother. He wants so badly for Tom to be Sam, for his twin brother to have been working alongside him to protect him. They’ll get through it, he knows. As twins, their bond runs deeper than anyone can really understand it.

Harry bids his goodbye to his brother, promising to stay in touch with him over the next however-long as he lays low with (Y/N). He imagines it won’t be that long, since she probably wants to regain a sense of normalcy. He knows that she loves her schedule and that it’s probably killing her to have to put it on hold for now, but Harry knows that (Y/N) can rationalize that fact to know that it’s what has to be done for her safety.

He calls his father next. The line rings until Harry’s almost positive that Dominic isn’t going to pick up, but on what feels like the last ring, he does.

“Harry?” His father’s voice comes thick through the line with an emotion that he can’t quite place.

It’s been so long since he’s heard his father have an emotion, Harry realizes, that he almost doesn’t believe it to be possible. Maybe that’s why he can’t recognize the emotion in his voice—it’s been so long since he’s been able to recognize anything besides unease or discomfort in his father’s tone that he can barely recognize the fact that there’s something new in his tone.

“Hey,” Harry wants to greet him informally, he wants to call him dad. But after everything that his father has put him through, that doesn’t feel right. That label doesn’t seem to fit him anymore and it hangs heavy in the world of unsaid words, in the weight of what could have been spoken between them.

“Are you safe?” Dominic’s words are still curt and straight to the point, something that Harry rationalizes will never really leave his tone no matter the emotion he’s experiencing.

“I am. And (Y/N) is with me.” He adds the last part in a rush, almost as if he doesn’t really want Dominic to hear it.

“Good. I…I suppose I’ll see you sometime, then?” The last part of his father’s words come out as a question, his tone soft with a hopeful affection that Harry almost wants to turn down.

“And we’ll talk through this, too. This warrants a discussion.”

For the first time in his relationship with his father, Harry is the one calling the shots. He’s the one making the decisions, and the power shift is ever-so-slight, but it’s noticeable. It hangs heavy between them, weighted with all of the words that the two of them never said to each other.

When they hang up, Harry wonders how many “I love you”s are weighing down within the shift.

* * *

 

(Y/N) wakes up the next morning with an ache in her back and a lump in her throat. She knows that she needs to talk to Harry about everything that went down eventually, she just doesn’t know how she’s supposed to do that.

There’s so much that they haven’t said to each other, so many secrets building up in the silence between them at breakfast. She finds it hard to breathe around them and she can taste the words on the back of her tongue. A part of her wonders if they taste better than the eggs Harry tried to cook.

“Sorry that they’re so runny.” These are the first words that Harry’s said to her all morning.

After her anxiety attack the night before, she fell into a restless sleep that had her waking up every few hours in a cold sweat. She’s so afraid that something’s going to happen and she’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“We need to talk.”

Her voice comes out softer than she wanted it to. In moments like these, she wants to be angry and unforgiving. She wants to be ruthless and fearsome, but really she just wants him to hold her. She just wants them to be able to move on together, even if that’s not what the universe is trying to get them to do.

She sees Harry’s shoulders tense and she knows that he’s been expecting this, but she also knows that he doesn’t want to talk about anything that they’ve gone through any more than she does. He wants to forget all of this just as much as she does, she knows. But, that doesn’t mean that they should forget and move on. (Y/N) reasons that doing so would only result in a worse conversation in the future—one that ends in them never speaking again.

“We’re soulmates,” she says, looking at him with a burst of clarity. “And you didn’t turn around that first day, but you followed me around and figured out where I work. Why did you go to that extreme when you could have just turned around in the first place?”

Harry draws in a breath and (Y/N) knows that this is a hard question for him to answer. This is more difficult than anything he’s ever had to do before, she realizes, and she imagines that it’s going to take a minute for him to find an answer that means something to the both of them; to find an answer that resembles the truth.

“I was scared,” he admits, voice soft and weak under the pressure of everything that he’s telling her. “I was really scared that you were going to hate me, that you were…that you would find out who I was and you’d run from me. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t curious as to who you are, and I…I really like the person that I’ve been able to get to know.”

“But I don’t know you, Harry.” These words have been sitting on the back of her tongue since she was taken by his family. She’s wanted to say them, she’s wanted to taste them on her tongue and know that she he understands just how fucked up this entire situation is.

“I only know what you let me see, and you…you’ve been lying to me this entire time. If we’re supposed to be together—if you want us to be together—you need to promise me that you’ll be honest with me. I need to know that we won’t have a fresh start, but that we can move on together if that’s what you want.”

“Is…Is that what you want?” She sees the color leave Harry’s cheeks as he says these words. “Do you want us to move on together, (Y/N)?”

It takes (Y/N) a minute to find the words that she needs. There is no clear answer; part of her knows that they’re soulmates and that they’re meant to ride out these things together, but another part of her knows that the hurt she feels isn’t something that’s easy to ride out alone, and it would only be harder to ride it out with someone else.

“I…I do,” she says, settling on her response that she knows isn’t the whole truth. “I want you to know, though, Harry, that I’m…I’m not going to forget this. We can move on together, but I never want us to forget what happened. I want…I just want us to keep it in mind as we move forward.”

Harry seems relieved by everything that she’s saying and she doesn’t know if that’s the reaction that she wanted, nor if it was the reaction that she expected. Did she want him to yell and scream and fight for her? Did she want him to display an outward range of emotions? Or was it simply what she expected of him after what information she’s gathered about his father?

She knows that Dominic wouldn’t have been so easy to have a conversation like this with. He would have yelled and screamed and fought her tooth and nail instead of hearing what she had to say. And maybe it’s wrong of her to expect that same reaction from Harry, especially when he’s proven to her that he’s nothing like his father wants him to be. Even in the small segments of him that she’s been able to get to know over the course of their relationships, she knows that he will never be anything like his father; she knows that he’s probably vowed that to himself time and time again.

“I can do that,” Harry breathes out this response so quietly that (Y/N) has to strain to hear him. “I will do that, (Y/N), I promise. As long…As long as you don’t want me out of your life altogether, I can do whatever you need me to do.”

And it’s in this tender moment that their next chapter begins. In the quiet that falls over them as they eat the runny eggs that Harry really did try hard to make before she woke up, (Y/N) knows that she’s made the right choice in deciding to move forward with him.

No matter how awful their first chapter together was, (Y/N) can’t help but anticipate with excitement how tender the rest of their story will be. She can’t help but want a lifetime of moments like these with Harry.


	21. epilogue

Things do not get better immediately. It is a slow turn, a gentle push into their tender future together; it takes kindness for her to trust him again, for her to trust him in the way that she knows she should. It takes time for her to heal and Harry does his best to understand.

Sometimes, Harry is not as patient as he should be. She is his soulmate and he wants to care for her in the way that he knows she deserves. He wants to give her the gentle type of love that he knows she deserves more than anyone he’s ever met before. And it isn’t fair that he can’t; he sometimes loses himself in the thought of all of the time that they have wasted in the lies.

“It’ll take time to get over this, Harry,” she tells him one night over dinner.

She’s been moved into Nikki’s safe-house. They live together as a couple, but they haven’t bridged the gap to be anything more than roommates.

“You know what I said that night at the cafe?” He reminds her, his eyes warm with the promises that he wants to make but he fears he won’t be able to keep.

“That you…”

“I would wait a lifetime for you if you asked me to,” he interrupts, knowing that it means more if he says it.

It means more for her to hear those words coming from him. It means more for her to hear his low timber, the gentleness in his voice as he promises this. She fears for a moment that he won’t be able to keep this promise, that it’s just another empty promise he’s making her. And she hates empty promises more than anything.

The words rise in the back of her throat, a chastising tone ready to unleash itself as she fears that this is just another empty promise. And then she sees the promise in his hazel eyes, so clear that it causes her breath to catch in her throat.

Maybe she can’t trust him completely yet, and maybe that’s okay.

Harry would wait a lifetime for her, she knows. And that’s what they have left to share together—an entire lifetime.

That’s the only promise she knows wholeheartedly that he intends to keep. And in that promise is the beginning of a future, the start of something great. They have a lifetime left to share together; and that’s something that she knows he will not take away from her.

If she cannot trust him in the first few months of their forever, she reasons that it’s okay. There’s an infinite amount of time that they have left to share together, and she knows that he has all of that time to get better at telling the truth and making promises that he can keep.

And she would wait a lifetime for him to learn those things, as long as she gets to stand by his side in the process.

Over time, she knows, she will learn how to trust him. She will outgrow her distaste of his family and she reasons that she will one day find her place with those men (and Tessa). While he is not good at telling the truth, she is bad at trusting people.

Neither of them is perfect, she knows. But they have an infinite lifetime of moments to gather together, keeping them close to their hearts for the moments where they are not together. They have a lifetime of mistakes to make together, a lifetime of character growth to go through with one another.

She doesn’t know if she’s ever heard of a promise quite as sweet as that one.


End file.
